


Missing

by PTlikesTea



Category: Hey Arnold!
Genre: Crime Scenes, F/M, Ghost Shenanigans, Graphic Descriptions of Criminal Acts, Murder Mystery, Some grim stuff, Trigger warnings up the wazoo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2018-12-04 07:43:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 30
Words: 75,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11550654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PTlikesTea/pseuds/PTlikesTea
Summary: Five years after Helga G. Pataki vanished, presumably murdered, her ghost pops up in Arnold's house to take care of some unfinished business.





	1. Chapter 1

**Missing**

 

This is probably not one of my better ideas. I'm already midway through some other longform fics, and updates may be sporadic, but given that Arnold/Helga was one of my baby ships I'd like to give something to the fandom to tide us all over until the Jungle Movie.

 

Note: Although this is somewhat inspired by Anohana, it is a very different egg with some twists and turns planned. Enjoy!

 

…..

 

It should have been a healthy sixteen-year-old heterosexual boy's dream come true to wake up to find a girl sitting on your bed.

 

Not so much when that girl was a girl you hadn't seen for five years.

 

Not so much when that girl was a girl who _nobody_ had seen in five years.

 

Definitely not when she looked just like she had on the posters and fliers and news reports, right down to her clothes (pink sundress, white sweater, pink ribbon in her hair, sneakers), the only difference being that the girl in those posters and fliers and news reports had been eleven years old, and the girl sitting on the end of Arnold's bed was around the same age he was.

 

It was unmistakably her. He would recognize those eyebrows anywhere.

 

“... _Helga?”_ he just about managed to choke out.

 

She jumped, frowned down at him as if he'd done something wrong (and oh, something in him had missed that look) and made to step off the bed. Dimly he noticed she was wearing only one shoe.

 

“...what? You can see me? _Now?”_ she growled.

 

“Of course I can see you....where have you....what....” he spluttered.

 

_This has to be a dream._

 

“I've been here for weeks,” Helga groaned. “You didn't see me before?”

 

He reached out to her, and at the same time pinched himself. The pain barely registered because his hand sank through her arm to clutch at the bedspread under her.

 

_Oh....well, he was definitely awake._

 

“That hasn't changed, then,” she said, tapping at his hand. His skin felt cold where she was touching him, like being touched by mist. It was a feeling he'd had before...he'd been looking for gaps in the drywall and the floorboards, for the source of that cold....well over five weeks....

 

“What are you doing here?” he managed to ask, his mind working furiously to make sense of this. Making sense of a girl who was missing, legally declared dead, suddenly popping up on his bed.

 

“I don't know,” she told him with a careless shrug. “I woke up here. And I can't seem to leave.”

 

“You can't...leave...?”

 

“I tried,” she continued. “I can't work the door, I keep sinking. I tried to get outside when the door was open, but I ended up back inside.”

 

It was all starting to make a crazy sort of sense. Of course she was a ghost. Everyone knew she was dead, even though she hadn't been found. But why would she end up haunting Arnold's house?

 

“I can't call you Football Head anymore,” she said, awfully casual for a dead person. “It almost looks normal. Too bad.”

 

_Football Head._

 

He wanted to cry. It had been so long. But instead he laughed.

 

“You can call me Football Head if you want.”

 

…..

 

They worked out some facts in the most bizarre conversation Arnold had ever had.

 

Helga couldn't remember anything about the day she disappeared, or anything after that until she 'woke up' in Arnold's house. She had been wandering around the boarding house for five weeks, wondering why nobody would talk to her or acknowledge her. She figured out she was a ghost about two weeks in, after phasing through the walls trying to leave. She couldn't move anything with solid weight, didn't sleep, didn't eat. Didn't do anything but watch.

 

But now Arnold was able to see her, she said she felt more 'solid.' She could still phase through walls and couldn't open doors, but she could pick up small objects (pens, paper, socks etc.)

 

He brought her downstairs (it was still early, everyone else was still in bed) and he opened the front door for her, and she made it down to the end of the stoop before she had to stop.

 

“I can't go any further,” she said.

 

“Why not?” he whispered, looking around for anyone else on the street.

 

“I don't know,” she shrugged. “Just a feeling.”

 

“A feeling?”

 

“I've never been a ghost before, doy,” she scoffed. “How am I supposed to know anything?”

 

They went back inside. The boarding house was just starting to wake up. In another hour he was going to be leaving for school. He grabbed some oatmeal from the kitchen, took it upstairs with a hurried comment to his grandmother that he had homework to finish.

 

He brought up news articles on his PC for her to read about her case. About how she had left school on a Thursday evening, hadn't gone home, and hadn't gone to school the next day. About how the alarm hadn't been raised until Saturday when she missed Little League practice, and how her best friend had called the police but her parents hadn't. About how one of her sneakers had been found in a ditch 30 miles out of town.

 

He watched her skim articles and think-pieces and polls all about her case with a solemn, indifferent gaze. She had been cute at eleven, big eyebrows and all. Theories about what had happened to her were wild, sordid, sometimes ghoulish. He'd seen pictures of her digitally altered to how she would look at sixteen, but they had gotten some details wrong. She was beautiful at sixteen, dead or not. Or maybe he just thought that because he had missed her more than he ever thought he would.

 

“Who's this Lancie guy?” she asked suddenly, making him choke a little on his oatmeal. “His name keeps popping up...”

 

“He's an out-of-town suspect,” Arnold answered. “He was found with your bike. I think he was in jail before for something to do with girls...”

 

“Huh,” she said, scrolling down the page. “I don't remember having a bike....”

 

“It was Phoebe's,” he said. “She gave you her old one to help you get to Little League.”

 

“Oh yeah,” she smiled. “She covered it with those stickers....I got most of them off but those stupid butterflies...”

 

He grinned to himself. The butterflies on her bike had been used as a sort of unofficial logo for any discussions of her case. It was just like her to hate the thing everyone was using to identify her.

 

“Lots of results for Bob here,” she muttered. “They really think he did it?”

 

Yes. The general consensus was that Bob Pataki had murdered his daughter, in Hillwood anyway. He had been called in for questioning multiple times and though they couldn't prove he had done it, all the dirt that came out about him in the papers ruined any kind of reputation he could have had afterwards.

 

“What do you think? He's your dad, could he have done it?” he asked carefully.

 

She spun a little in the computer chair, thinking. How bitter to think that she couldn't immediately say no, her father could not and would not have killed her.

 

“It's possible,” she said at last, so casually it hurt Arnold to hear it. “Maybe not on purpose, but accidents happen....”

 

Over her shoulder the picture they had used in all the case files flickered on Arnold's PC screen. It was her school photo, she was smiling, her hair was tidy and her clothes were clean. But Arnold knew that there was much speculation about how few pictures they had gathered, how her family had almost none, and how a lot of the alternative photos had come from either the school or Phoebe. There were two floating around on the internet, on true crime websites. She had stitches on her head in one, a bad case of measles in the other. These were evidence that her family were neglectful at best, outright abusive at worst.

 

_We all knew. All the kids, all the grown-ups. Nobody did anything until she was gone._

 

“Wonder why I didn't wake up at my house,” she mused, spinning in the chair. “You think Bob had something to do with that?”

 

“They don't live there anymore,” he told her.

 

“What? They moved?”

 

“Yeah, about six months after you went missing,” he explained.

 

They'd had their windows broken, doors smashed in, paint thrown at the house. Bob's store had been broken into and trashed. Arnold thought they might have even changed their names.

 

“Figures,” Helga huffed.

 

The chime on his phone, the one that told him it was time to leave the house for school, jingled on the desk.

 

“I gotta go,” he told her regretfully. “You'll be here when I get back, right?”

 

“I think so,” she said, clicking on another crime blog. “I'm not planning on going anywhere, anyways. Say hi to Phoebe for me.”

 

Biking down the hill, Arnold had time to think. Once upon a time he had dreaded going to school to deal with Helga G. Pataki. Then, he would have given anything to deal with her at school, to make things _normal_ again. And now he wanted nothing more than to stay away from school to deal with her. It felt like something had clicked back into place.

 

…..

 

Arnold was something of a loner at school, nobody bothered him but nobody bothered _with_ him either. Out of the corner of his eye, as he was taking books out of his locker, he spotted Gerald with his crew, lounging outside the door for Homeroom and passing comments on any girls that skittered past them.

 

_How long has it been?_

 

Their friendship hadn't disintegrated overnight, but shortly after Helga went missing Arnold had found he didn't like the person Gerald was becoming. They cut ties for good almost a year later, and they were coldly polite to each other in person. It helped that they didn't have many classes together, Arnold was top in pretty much everything and Gerald was flunking most of his.

 

Rhonda was sitting across from him as he took his seat in homeroom. She was furiously typing something on her phone, stroking her thumb across her jaw to blend some tiny flaw in her make-up. Her long elaborate nails clattered against the phone screen obnoxiously. How many words had she spoken to Arnold in the past few years? Probably less than ten.

As the bell rang, Phoebe hurried in, curled in on herself as she always was. She sat at the back, close to the door.

 

_Say hi to Phoebe for me._

 

For the first time in a long, long time, Arnold really looked at Phoebe.

 

She had been interviewed on TV a few times during the search. America had warmed to this poor little girl who had lost her best friend, shaking and stumbling over her words as newscasters gently asked her about what they did together, about the bike she had given her, if she wanted to send her friend a message.

 

 **I WANT YOU TO COME HOME** the headlines quoted in huge glaring letters, with the tear-flushed face of the little girl on the front page. **I MISS YOU SO MUCH.**

 

Then the story was old news, and Phoebe was largely forgotten by the media, except to bring up a point that she, as an eleven year old girl, had been the first person to alert police that Helga was missing. Sometimes whoever was writing the article or blog-post wondered how she was doing.

 

She wasn't doing well.

 

Her hair was long, stringy and unkempt. Her glasses were smudged, her skin pale and ashy-looking. She was buried under a shapeless wool sweater and leggings with holes at the knee. She might have still been pretty, under that lackluster appearance, if it wasn't for the air of pure misery that followed her around.

 

Arnold was a loner, but people still talked to him every now and then. People went out of their way not to talk to Phoebe. Ironically, she was more of a ghost than the actual ghost sitting in his room surfing the internet.

 

…..

 

He hurried home after school, half-afraid that the morning had been some hallucination, that Helga wouldn't be there.

 

She was.

 

Exactly where he had left her, in fact, and looking more alive than any dead person had a right to.

 

“That was quick,” she quipped, spinning in the chair and poking her one bare foot in his direction. “You say hi to Phoebe for me?”

 

“No,” he answered, tossing his bag onto the bed. “I thought it might make me look a bit....insane.”

 

“Fair point,” she agreed. “How is she?”

 

How could he tell her? When he knew she'd want to leave the house when she physically couldn't, to save her friend from drowning in her own unhappiness?

 

“She's....okay,” he lied.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Two**

 

… **..**

Around the age of ten, when they had only started in the fifth grade, some sort of shift happened with Helga. It was something you wouldn't have noticed unless you were pretty close to her (or just very familiar with her, as Arnold was) and it was gradual, barely seen until one day you paid attention and realized she was a completely different person.

 

She started wearing her hair differently, ditching the pigtails and the head-eating bow for loose waves, a few strands tied back from her face with a more modest pink ribbon. She grew enough so that her eyebrows finally fit her face, and although they were no less bushy it was in around the time strong eyebrows were just becoming fashionable.

 

She tossed the spitballs and snide remarks and the all-round air of irritation with the rest of the world, and although she could still be sharp with the insults and quick with a fist mostly she treated everyone around her with a cool indifference. She could have easily become one of the cool girls (and indeed the cool girls at the time were desperate to get her to join their little coven) but she stuck with loyal, steadfast Phoebe. She joined Little League in the spring and quickly became their star player, easily forgiven for driving fast balls that sprained wrists for just how many games the team won with her at the helm.

 

Boys clamored for her attention, in and out of school. The boys on her baseball team, some of them sixth and seventh graders, jostled each other to walk her home. She got notes in her locker, slipped into her books, passed over at lunch. Arnold watched her open one of these notes once during lunch, watched as she rolled her eyes, tossed it into the garbage can and said something dismissive about it to a giggling Phoebe.

 

He missed her. He didn't think he would but he did.

 

He missed the spitballs and the insults and _'Football Head'_ and that way she used to glower at him with her eyes narrowed and those thick brows furrowed and the deadpan tone of her voice. She no longer spoke to or about him the same way she did, and she seemed to look through him instead of at him.

 

And then she disappeared, and he would have given anything to have her look through him again.

 

…..

 

She said she didn't need to sleep, but when she yawned for the third time he asked if he should set her up with a bed.

 

“I didn't sleep before,” she said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “I don't remember yawning much, either...”

 

“I dunno, maybe you're shifting or something?” he wondered. “Maybe it's different because I can see you.”

 

“Shifting? Why do you think that?”

 

“I read something online once, something about spirits taking on different forms for different purposes,” he shrugged. “Can't remember where I saw it though.”

 

“You think I'm here for some purpose?” she asked, stifling another yawn through her fingers.

 

“Well, yeah,” he answered. “Like, ghosts in the movies always come back because they have unfinished business...”

 

She hummed a bit dubiously, rubbing the carpet with her bare foot. The shoed one tapped on the leg of the chair.

 

“You have unfinished business,” he continued. “No-one knows what happened to you...”

 

“That no-one includes me,” she told him. “I have no idea what happened.”

 

“Yeah, and maybe you're meant to find out. Like, maybe you don't know anything now, but your memory could be jogged by something...we could find some clue the police missed.”

 

Now she looked a little more awake. She glanced at the flickering computer screen, where the details of her case were spread over ten different browser tabs.

 

“Where would we start?” she asked.

 

“The shoe,” Arnold blurted out before he could stop himself.

 

The shoe was that one detail that had caught him like a fishhook. Found in an irrigation ditch thirty miles from Hillwood, on partially deserted farmland. The nearest road was seven and a half miles away, and the land itself was fenced off and undisturbed. It was searched and partially dug up, looking for a body, but nothing was ever found except for that shoe. It was like it had been dropped from the sky.

 

And it was definitely Helga's shoe. Even if there had been a number of tween girls wearing these particular white sneakers with pink laces, even if her name written on it was a coincidence, the ghost sitting across from him wearing its twin left no room for doubt.

 

She yawned, again.

 

“The couch okay with you? It's pretty comfortable,” he said, going to his closet and dragging out the spare comforter and pillows.

 

“You....want me to sleep here?” she asked.

 

“None of the boarding rooms are free right now,” he said. “Or I'd clear one out for you, but I'd have to explain that to my Grandpa and....”

 

“I don't need a whole room,” she demurred. “Up until now I didn't even need a bed.”

 

“Then you've been awake for weeks, so you definitely need to rest.”

 

He laid out the pillows and comforter and left to change into his Pjs in the bathroom. When he came back in she was buried under the comforter, just a patch of blonde fuzz visible on the pillow.

 

“This is nice,” she said, muffled through the fabric. “Thanks.”

 

A spreading warmth trickled under Arnold's skin, looking at the girl-shaped lump of covers on the couch.

 

“No problem,” he said. “We can make a plan for the weekend after school tomorrow.”

 

…..

 

Helga was still asleep when he left for school. He checked on her, and she looked more solid and real than ever. She mumbled something in her sleep and he tucked her in before he jogged out the door.

 

It was hard to concentrate in class; he had made a catalogue of all the places he passed on his bike, and he tallied them over and over in his head.

 

Bob's old beeper shop. _Would she have gone there after school? Why?_

 

The street corner where the Jolly-Olly man stopped his truck. _He was interviewed, said he didn't see her. But he sees so many kids, why was he so clear he hadn't seen her in particular?_

 

The city library. _Phoebe was there after school, Helga didn't go with her. Phoebe's phone was turned off because of the library rules. Helga might have tried to call her if she was in trouble._

 

The batting cages. _Some of her teammates saw her there the day before. She went there a lot after school._

 

The corner store. _Security cameras put her there between 4 and 5pm. She bought a soda and a bag of chips. She was alone._

 

That kid he sometimes talked to at lunch _(Dan?Dave?)_ asked if he was feeling okay. He hadn't realized but he had been staring hard at his lunch without actually touching it for most of the lunch period.

 

“I'm fine,” he laughed weakly. “Didn't get much sleep last night, that's all.”

 

“You worried about the test?” Dan _(or Dave?)_ asked.

 

“Little bit,” Arnold lied.

 

_Who saw her that day?_

 

She hadn't gotten on a train or bus, security cameras showed that much. She had her bike when she left the corner store, and then Andrew Lancie was caught trying to pawn it two towns over. The woods had been searched with dogs. Speed cameras on the outskirts of Hillwood hadn't picked her up on foot. If she left Hillwood, it would have had to have been in someone's car.

 

“Maybe you should go to the nurse's office,” Dave _(or Dan?)_ said. “You're seriously spaced out.”

 

A throaty laugh from the edge of the cafeteria made him jump, and even before he turned around to watch he knew Harold was tormenting another freshman. Apparently he had cornered some poor skinny goth-ish kid and was setting fire to his homework. The cafeteria monitor was watching impassively, with no sign he was going to intervene.

 

_Harold was never this bad before._

 

That wasn't quite true, was it? He had always been a bully....but his bullying had been a mildly understandable front for his insecurities regarding his weight, his slowness, his appearance. These days he was downright sadistic.

 

But if he thought about it (and sometimes he did) everyone was worse than they had been before. His former best friend was egocentric and careless with people's feelings. Phoebe was a crumpled shell of what she had been. Rhonda was even more self-absorbed and cruel to other girls. Sid was a creep, Stinky hardly even turned up at school any more. Eugene was constantly out of school with 'illnesses' that doctors couldn't find any evidence of.

 

Arnold had wondered from time to time if they would have been different if Helga hadn't gone missing. He knew Phoebe at least would be in a better place, but who was to say?

 

The effect it had on the class couldn't be denied. Before Helga vanished, kids had walked to school, hung out on street corners, let themselves into their homes while their parents were at work. After, parents picked up their kids or got someone they trusted to pick them up. They were called in from the street before the sun even began to set. There were no more latchkey kids, parents quit their jobs instead.

 

The class was numb for months, disbelieving that anything could have happened to Helga. Their teacher was shaky, prone to tears, and the grown-ups spoke in whispers. Playground rumors spread around were nasty, graphic and upsetting. They couldn't have come away from it all without being damaged in some way.

 

…..

 

As Arnold unlocked his bike, he spotted Phoebe shuffling out of the library door, shoving a stack of books into her backpack.

 

_When did I last speak to her?_

 

Helga's ghost had come to him, for some reason, and not her best friend. He felt bad for her, in an all new way.

 

“Phoebe!” he called.

 

She looked up, frowned, and hurried away. He rushed after her, his bike clattering against the pavement.

 

“Hang on,” he gasped as he caught up to her. “I just want to talk for a minute.”

 

“What do you want?” she snapped, not slowing, not looking at him.

 

“It's been a while,” he said. “I just want to know how you're doing.”

 

“I'm fine.”

 

_No, you're not. Everyone can see that._

 

“I mean, really,” he said, drawing up alongside her to look at her face. “I know it's been hard. I'm sorry I didn't do this sooner...”

 

“Do what?” she said as she stopped suddenly, glaring at him.

 

“You know...” he shrugged, at a loss. He had been impulsive, hadn't expected to get this far. “Check in on you.”

 

“Why would you want to do that?” Furious red spots bloomed on her cheeks, a sharp contrast to her deathly pallor.

 

He shrugged again, suddenly embarrassed.

 

“I feel like Helga would have wanted me to keep an eye on you.”

 

She had been angry before, but as soon as the name left his mouth her fury could be felt radiating from Phoebe in waves. He took a step back; she looked like she wanted to hit him.

 

“You don't know what Helga would have wanted,” she hissed. “You didn't know her.”

 

She pushed past him so hard he nearly fell over. He let her go, watching her helplessly.

 

That could have gone better.

 

…..

 

“You feeling okay, Shortman?” his grandpa asked.

 

The nickname was ironic, now that he was a head taller than Phil. He smiled weakly, and stirred his potatoes into mush.

 

“Didn't get much sleep last night,” he lied for the second time that day.

 

“It's those chinchillas,” his grandma muttered. “Too noisy at night.”

 

No-one in the boarding house had chinchillas, of course, but Arnold nodded in agreement anyway.

 

“Hey Grandpa,” he began, pushing his plate away. “Mind if I ask you something?”

 

“Go ahead.”

 

“Remember when Helga Pataki went missing?”

 

Gertie got up from the table, shaking her head as she left the room. Phil pushed his own plate away, looking uncharacteristically grim.

 

“Hard to forget that kind of thing, Shortman,” he said quietly. “What about it?”

 

“What did people say about it? I mean, I read the reports and a bunch of stuff online....but what about you and the rest of the neighborhood?”

 

Phil leaned back in his chair and sighed.

 

“It was pretty obvious to us, Arnold,” he said. “Someone was watching her.”

 

He blinked. _That_ was pretty unexpected.

 

“Why do you think that?” he asked. “I thought everyone thought her dad did it....”

 

“Big Bob was an asshole,” Phil said, and now Arnold _knew_ he was in serious mode because he almost never swore. “But he didn't kill that little girl. He let her wander all over town on her own for years, though. Might as well have painted a great big target on her back.”

 

…..

 

Upstairs, Helga was waiting for him. She had made a little nest out of the pillows and comforter.

 

“I left the house today,” she told him, not even bothering with a greeting. “Made it as far as Stoop Kid's stoop.”

 

“That's great,” he said. “You think you'll be able to go further?”

 

“I think so,” she replied. “I feel like I can walk around as long as I have some connection to the house. I can see Stoop Kid's stoop from here so...”

 

She trailed off with a shrug. Arnold took out a notepad and brought up Hillwood on Google Maps.

 

“Right,” he said, uncapping a pen. “Tomorrow, we're going to start retracing your steps.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Three**

 

… **..**

 

He had stopped for ice cream with Gerald on the way home. They'd been at the pier most of the day and only headed for home when their skin started feeling warm. He wasn't expected back long before dusk, Grandma would leave a plate in the microwave for him. They stopped for ice cream, and the sun was just starting to set when he put his key in the door and realized that something was _off._

 

The police officers had parked the squad car across the street, he hadn't noticed it at first. He heard them murmuring in the front room before he saw them.

 

_Something's happened to Grandpa._

 

Arnold's thoughts raced, his heart hammered painfully.

 

“That'll be him now,” Phil said from the front room.

 

_Not Grandpa then. Grandma._

 

But no, he could hear her familiar half-step bustling around in the kitchen.

 

_Ernie? Mr Hyuhn? Oskar?_

 

“Arnold? These men want a word wit'cha....” Phil called.

 

_They wouldn't talk to me if it was someone in the boarding house. Someone I know then. A kid._

 

He swallowed, hard, and made his way to the front room.

 

The officers were young, friendly-looking (probably why they were on this duty.) They smiled at him as he gingerly sat on the chair across from them. Somehow that made things worse because he knew he wasn't in trouble, and that meant someone else was.

 

“Hey there Arnold,” the sandy-haired officer started. “No need to be worried, son, you're not in trouble or anything.”

 

“What's this about?” he asked, bluntly.

 

“Do you know a girl named Helga Pataki?” the dark-haired officer asked, holding out a picture Arnold didn't even look at.

 

_Helga?_

 

“Yeah,” he stammered. “She's my....she's in my class....”

 

“When was the last time you saw Helga?”

 

“Um....” he combed back through his memories, trying to find her in there somewhere. “Thursday. I saw her after school. Crossing the street.”

 

“That the street near the corner store?”

 

“Yeah...”

 

The sandy-haired officer scribbled notes in a small writing pad.

 

“Was she alone?”

 

“Yeah... I mean, she left school with Phoebe but when I saw her she was by herself...”

 

The officers exchanged a glance when he mentioned Phoebe, but he couldn't tell what was meant by it.

 

“She wasn't in school on Friday...we all figured she was sick.”

 

No-one had been particularly worried, except for Phoebe who had been sending messages on her phone during every class break with a tense look on her face. Arnold thought it was strange at the time, for all of two minutes, before he got distracted.

 

“Thank you Arnold, that's very helpful,” the dark-haired officer said, putting the photo away. “I just have a few more questions and then we'll be on our way. Did Helga have a boyfriend you knew of?”

 

_Boyfriend? She's eleven!_

 

“No,” he answered. “I mean, there was some guy on the baseball team but she wasn't really interested...that's what I heard, anyway.”

 

“Right,” the dark-haired officer said, pointing something out on the scribbled notes to his colleague. “Do you know if she had any problems at home?”

 

_Yes. Everyone knows._

 

“Well...” he began. “Her dad is kind of a jerk....and her mom forgets things sometimes....”

 

They exchanged a look again.

 

“You noticed any injuries on Helga lately, Arnold?” the sandy-haired officer asked. “Bruises, cuts, burns...that kind of thing?”

 

“No,” he said immediately, but then thought about it properly because actually, he had. “She had a few scrapes and she had a black eye for a while, but she said it was from baseball.”

 

She had said it with such flippant conviction that everyone bought it. Or maybe they bought it because they desperately wanted it to be true.

 

“I see,” the sandy-haired officer said, closing his notebook. “Thanks for that, Arnold, it's been very helpful.”

 

They started to get up, and in a panic Arnold blurted out his own question.

 

“What's happened to her? Is she okay?”

 

The sandy-haired officer smiled, kindly.

 

“She never made it home Thursday evening,” he said. “We're checking every lead we have. I'm sure she'll be found soon.”

 

…..

 

Helga wasn't there when Arnold woke up, she left a puddle of blankets on the sofa behind her. His stomach dropped, but then she strolled right through the door, fussing with her hair.

 

“I took a shower,” she explained flippantly, even though she looked as dry as ever.

 

“Do ghosts take showers?” he asked, the sudden adrenaline rush wearing off.

 

“They do now,” was her response.

 

He half-wondered if she had undressed to shower, and at the sudden blush that he could feel blooming across his face he turned away from her before she could notice.

 

He showered, dressed and shoved three slices of toast down his throat with Helga shadowing close behind (though she kept a respectful distance while he was showering and dressing). She was eager to get going, she kept tapping her shoeless foot off the wall impatiently.

 

“Gotta take a look at them pipes,” Phil muttered as he passed by them in the hall.

 

“I'll do it later Grandpa,” Arnold promised. “I got plans today.”

 

“You said you'd look for those cracks too,” Phil said. “I'd do it meself but you know with my knees...”

 

“I found the cracks and covered them already,” Arnold lied, stealing a glance at Helga. “Sorry, I thought I told you...”

 

The boarding house was in worse need of repair than ever, old as it was Phil had kept it ticking for a long time, but with his advanced age hindering him more and more it mostly fell to Arnold to do any of the tough jobs, when he had time. Now that he thought about it, he hadn't spent a weekend away from the boarding house since he was twelve. No wonder Gerald didn't want to hang out with him anymore.

 

“I'll take a look at the pipes when I get back,” he promised again. “I gotta go to this thing today, it's really important.”

 

With a reluctant sigh, Phil waved him off. Arnold marched out the door and grabbed his bike from under the stoop, Helga trailing close behind him.

 

“We're not going to bike all the way, are we?” Helga asked, poking his bike with her shoeless foot. “You said it was thirty miles away.”

 

“Of course not,” Arnold told her in a whisper. If anyone saw him talking to her they'd think he'd gone nuts. “We're taking the train. We're going to bike to the places you were last seen first, see if it jogs your memory.”

 

“Huh....not a bad idea, Football Head,” Helga said. “Colour me surprised.”

 

He smiled, despite himself. She was sounding more like _herself_ now.

 

“You'll have to sit here,” he said, pointing to the basket on the front of the bike.

 

She frowned, and he thought for a moment she wouldn't go for it. She was small (not as small as her eleven-year-old self but not that much bigger either), it would be a tight fit but the only other option was sitting her on the crossbar and that was strangely intimate and a bit too much for Arnold to handle. But then she shrugged and clambered in, leaning on his arm (his skin tingled where her incorporeal hand gripped him).

 

“I feel like groceries,” she grumbled. He had padded the base of the basket but her knees were still up around her chest, her legs poking out over the side awkwardly.

 

“If it gets too uncomfortable you can ride the crossbar,” he offered, hoping she wouldn't take it.

 

“It's fine,” she shrugged. “Can we go?”

 

…..

 

At school, the kids had been blasé about the police coming to talk to them. They considered it exciting, even a little glamorous, to have a runaway in their class. Rumors spread, especially among the girls, about where Helga might have gone. Some whispered that she had an older boyfriend, some guy on the baseball team from a different school who was, according to who was telling the tale, between thirteen and fifteen. (Fifteen was too old for Little League, but why would that get in the way of a good story?)

 

Around the end of the first week since she disappeared, the glamour started to wear off. Phoebe came back to school, shaky and upset. The runaway shelters had been called and checked and no-one fitting Helga's description had shown up. Her phone wasn't reachable.

 

By the end of the second week they knew something was seriously wrong. Their parents monitored the radio and TV broadcasts, jumping up to switch them off at any mention of the case. No more rumors were floating except for the worst; her father had finally killed her, or her older boyfriend had. The school counselor announced that his office was always open for anyone who needed to talk to someone.

 

Near the end of the third week, the shoe was found in the drainage ditch thirty miles out of Hillwood. That was how they knew for certain something awful had happened to Helga, and the time for rumors and speculation was over. It was replaced by a sort of horrified numbness, that they had never experienced real horror and had no idea how to react to it.

 

Everyone took it differently. The girls in the class collectively experienced a sort of hostility towards the boys, for no clear reason they could explain. The boys, together and individually, had aspects of their personalities magnified by discomfort. They all became louder, cruder. Gerald became more nonchalant, to the point of unfeeling. Harold took a level in cruelty. Eugene's myriad illnesses piled up until he was allergic to living itself. And Rhonda, whose entire life had been dedicated to some mysterious social status, abruptly cut off every single friend in her life and talked to nobody.

 

Phoebe was falling apart, but nobody knew what to do about it. And why would they? They were just kids.

 

…..

 

They circled the elementary school, but Helga only had hazy recollections of time spent there. They passed the empty lot, and she remembered playing baseball there but only distantly. Arnold's bike nearly knocked against the Jolly Olly man's truck (and he got yelled at) but she didn't seem to remember him at all.

 

He stopped at the corner store (as she had done) and bought a bag of chips and a soda (as she did) and when he walked back out she was staring hard at the movie theatre.

 

“Something caught your eye?” he asked.

 

“That's not right,” she said, pointing at the theatre. “It doesn't look right.”

 

“It was re-done three years ago,” Arnold told her. “New management.”

 

“Oh,” she said, looking sheepish.

 

“That's good, right? You remember what it used to look like. It means we're on the right track.”

 

“I guess.”

 

Slowly, as they passed the different spots that denoted a Hillwood childhood, she recognized things he wouldn't have thought of. The park had new gates that locked electronically and were taller than the old ones. The skating rink was gone and a new extra-large grocery store in its place. The Donut Cafe expanded and now sold churros, cupcakes and smoothies.

 

“Is that Rhonda?” she said suddenly as they flew past the cafe.

 

Sure enough, it was Rhonda. Tapping away on her phone as usual, bored and irritated, dressed in sleek shiny clothes that were probably the height of fashion. She didn't even look up as Arnold's bike passed her.

 

“Yeah, that's Rhonda,” Arnold said.

 

“Why didn't you say hi? Isn't that what you usually do?”

 

That _was_ what he would have done, when he was eleven. Not at sixteen.

 

“She's different now,” Arnold responded.

 

“Different how?” Helga probed.

 

_Meaner._

 

_Crueler._

 

_A lot less talkative._

 

“Different,” Arnold shrugged, and thankfully Helga dropped it. It was awkward, but no more awkward than having to badmouth a former friend to one who had been away for so long.

 

They boarded the train easily enough, Helga phasing through the gate with ease. She stared out the window on the way and stayed mercifully quiet, knowing Arnold couldn't talk to her while there were people around. But as the train began to empty, she began asking questions.

 

“You can nod, right? Make like you're listening to music or something,” she demanded.

 

Arnold glanced around. As they got closer to industrial farmland, there were only a handful of people around. He nodded.

 

“So Rhonda doesn't talk to you anymore? Does she talk to anyone?”

 

Arnold shook his head.

 

“What about Nadine?”

 

_Nadine transferred out two years ago. They weren't friends anymore._

 

He shook his head.

 

“There was....whats-his-name....Henry? Harris? You know, the fat one....”

 

 _Harold_ he mouthed.

 

“Harold, that's it! Wasn't she sweet on him or something?”

 

Arnold shook his head.

 

“Is he still sweet on her?”

 

Arnold shrugged.

 

“Doesn't he talk about her? Or any girl?”

 

_Not to me._

 

Anything Harold said about girls was done in a crude hoot and it was usually obscene. All the girls gave him a wide berth.

 

He shook his head again.

 

Their stop was the next one, and they disembarked to a wide dusty wasteland. The staff entrance of the farmland was locked up for the weekend, and no security guarded it. Arnold pushed his bike down the side of the chainlink fence, looking for the best way in.

 

“Does this look familiar to you?” he called to Helga, trailing behind him.

 

“No,” she answered. “Did we ever come out here as kids?”

 

“Not us, some of the sixth graders played hooky here when they were growing corn. Then they beefed up security.”

 

There was a small hole in the fence, just enough for Arnold to crawl through on his stomach. Helga phased through the fence. He lead her over to the drainage ditch, through the runnels of tilled dry soil. It hadn't rained in weeks, the very air around them felt bone dry.

 

“This,” Arnold said, holding up his printed-out picture of Helga's lost shoe for comparison, “is where they found the shoe.”

 

“Exactly here?”

 

There was no doubt in Arnold's mind, the rocks slatted into the sides of the ditch looked the same. It was marked off by a yard marker, twelve yards from the fence. It was as close as they were going to get to the exact location.

 

“Pretty much,” he said.

 

She hummed, wrapped her arms around herself, trailing her shoeless foot in the dust. She stared hard at the site, as though willing something to happen.

 

“It's not ringing any bells,” she mumbled, tilting her head to one side.

 

“Why else would your shoe have been here?” Arnold asked. “It was the only thing they ever found.”

 

Saying those words out loud filled him with a sudden, odd form of terror. It occurred to him that she was only here as a ghost on the whim of some mysterious force, and the shoe could very well be all anyone would ever find of her. A lump formed in his throat, and he tried hard to swallow it away.

 

Helga traced the ditch with her eyes, turning to see it run out under the fence, to where it was buried under the cement foundation of the train tracks, up through the overgrown green commons, up to the edge of the forest...

 

….suddenly she went rigid, and Arnold heard her gasp.

 

“What? What is it?” he cried, lurching to her side.

 

“The trees,” she whispered, shuddering so hard her form seemed to ripple in the air like heat waves. “I know those trees....I've been....”

 

She said something else, but it was silent. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out of it. She pointed a shaky finger at the woods, the hills that gave Hillwood its name, and then she blinked out of existence.

 

 

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Four**

 

…..

 

The train took its sweet time bringing Arnold back to Hillwood, he paced up and down the carriage all the way. Once he left the station he pedaled his bike home as fast as he could, lungs burning and muscles aching but no worse than the rising panic that he was going to get to his house to find Helga was not there.

 

She would manifest back in the house. She had done that before, he knew. He had a feeling she was there, waiting for him to get back.

 

But what if she wasn't?

 

…..

 

Helga's parents appeared on TV just once, a month into her disappearance. They went through the motions of asking for help bringing their daughter home, but it was hard to feel sympathy for them. Miriam looked even more out of it than usual, yellow in the face, slurring her words, staring vacantly into the camera. Probably sedated with more than liquor.

 

Bob, though...

 

Bob didn't look like a grieving father. He looked _angry,_ not distraught. He gritted his teeth and let his wife do the talking, clenching his fists in full view of the camera. When a journalist asked if there was any chance Helga had tried to get in contact, he huffed through his teeth and looked away. That moment was when roughly half of America decided Bob Pataki was a murderer.

 

They got a hard time in the aftermath. Cranks from online crime communities regularly turned up on their doorstep demanding that Bob confess. Helga's sister dropped out of her senior year of college because people kept asking her about her father. Miriam stopped going outside, and the amount of glass bottles found in the trash doubled.

 

Nobody shopped at the beeper store (which was by now a general electrical goods store where most kids got their first phone, but not anymore) and gradually Bob stopped going to work. The store remained locked up, until it was broken into, thousands of dollars of merchandise stolen and the outside coated with red paint. Someone had crudely scrawled the words _WHERE IS SHE_ across the placard.

 

They stuck it out for a long time; Bob had insurance, he had the store cleaned up but he didn't reopen. They got their groceries delivered and put up with the stares and whispers when they did venture outside. But after a while it got too much for them. When Bob's car was stolen and found burned out outside the store, they packed up and left Hillwood. Nobody bothered to find out where they had gone, and although online sleuths tried to puzzle it out the remaining Patakis were largely forgotten.

 

…..

 

He tossed his bike carelessly under the stoop, ran up the stairs with a cursory greeting to his Grandpa and threw open his door, half-convinced Helga wouldn't be there...

 

...she was. Looking no worse for wear, just a little sulky.

 

“I don't know what happened....” she began. “I...”

 

She was abruptly cut off when Arnold crossed the few feet separating them and pulled her into his arms. He held onto her tight, just to make sure she was still there. She felt solid enough, but he squeezed her hard, just in case.

 

In elementary school she had been taller than him. Now her head fit neatly in the spot under his chin where his neck met his head. There was something reassuring about that.

 

She stood there and let him hold her for who knows how long, before gently prying his arms off of her and stepping back.

 

“You should sit down,” she told him, and sure enough his legs did feel like they were buckling under him. “Did you bike all the way back?”

 

“No,” he told her breathlessly. “I just hurried back....we're not doing that again.”

 

“Okay,” she agreed. She was looking at him like he had gone slightly mad, and maybe he had.

 

After catching his breath, he went downstairs for dinner. He renewed his promise to his Grandpa to check the pipes (he didn't need to, pipes were fine, Helga just liked tapping on the walls). As he chewed a hard lump of lukewarm meatloaf he puzzled out what to do next.

 

_She reacted to the trees. The hills._

 

There was a stream in those hills. Wasn't a big one, but it swelled when the weather was bad. And there had been early summer storms the week Helga went missing.

 

It wasn't a new clue, exactly. He had seen it mooted before on sleuth blogs, along with a topography map of the general area. The stream could have carried Helga's shoe into the drainage ditch if there was enough rainfall. But the stream had been dredged for other clues and nothing else had been found. It was nowhere near big enough for her to have fallen in and drowned, that theory had been thoroughly debunked by professionals and amateurs.

 

_What else is there?_

 

Then a thought struck him; Helga's 'boyfriend.'

 

…..

 

Patrick Castle was thirteen, and for the girls who gossiped that was exciting. It was a triumph for any girl to have an older boyfriend, glamorous even. The fact that they weren't actually dating didn't seem to matter. Anyone who asked Helga about it got a derisive snort and a roll of her eyes.

 

It was curious; when they were nine they were so eager to date, and crushes seemed all important. Arnold's own crushes had lost much of their lustre when he turned ten and realized that dating at that age was kind of ridiculous. Not to mention Ruth was known for dating much older boys, and Lila moved away when her father remarried. She wrote once, he wrote back, and that was it.

 

Rhonda wanted to date older boys, she talked about it a lot back when she actually talked to people. She seemed angry that Helga had managed to get something she wanted without even trying, and at the same time strangely proud that her 'friend' had this elusive status.

 

Patrick had been interviewed after Helga went missing, and he denied that they had ever dated. He'd spent time with her because she was on the baseball team, he saw her as a little sister. And in any case he had an alibi for that weekend; he was in Washington State with his family.

 

…..

 

“...Castle?” Helga wondered, scratching at a spot above her right eye.

 

“Ring any bells?” Arnold pushed.

 

“Sort of,” Helga answered. “We dated?”

 

“Everyone else thought so. You wouldn't give anyone a straight answer. And he denied it when you went missing.”

 

“Then we probably didn't,” Helga said, tracing circles on the carpet with her shoeless foot. “Who dates an eleven-year-old anyway? Even I know that's creepy.”

 

“That's what the peanut gallery says too,” Arnold told her, flicking through a bunch of comments on a blog post about Castle. “That's why he wasn't ruled out as a suspect. Do you have any memories of him?”

 

“Sort of, they're blurry,” she answered. “I think he walked me home a few times after practice. I can't recall much else.”

 

“I found his Facebook,” Arnold told her, switching tabs. “He's on a college break, he's working as an assistant coach for the Little League.”

 

“You're going to talk to him?”

 

“Worth a shot.”

 

The Little League practice field was closer than the industrial farm, so he felt less cagey about letting Helga tag along. She hopped into the basket without complaint. They found Patrick Castle in seconds, helping a very small bespectacled girl with her swing.

 

He was good-looking, Arnold had to admit. Sandy-haired, classically American square-jaw-and-straight -nose-and perfect grin with perfect teeth. Arnold had never seen him at thirteen, but if she was anything like he was at nineteen no wonder the girls had lost their minds.

 

He looked over at Helga; she was staring at Patrick, frowning slightly and rubbing that spot on her head again. Dimly Arnold wondered if ghosts could get headaches.

 

“Can I help you?”

 

Patrick had crossed the field to the bleachers without Arnold noticing, and he jumped. Of course Patrick would notice, he was the only other near-adult watching practice.

 

“Uh, yeah...” Arnold stammered, caught off guard. “....you're Patrick Castle, right?”

 

“I am,” Patrick answered amiably. “What can I do for you?”

 

“It's about Helga Pataki....”

 

At the mention of her name, Patrick's face clouded over and he turned his back.

 

“I'm not in the mood for this today,” he called over his shoulder, a hard note to his voice. “Get your kicks some other place.”

 

“What? No,” Arnold said as he stumbled down the bleachers after him. “I just wanted to ask some questions.”

 

“They all want to ask questions,” Patrick growled. “Not today. There's kids here. I told the police everything I knew and that info is online. Get it there.”

 

“Look, I'm not from the web, okay?” said Arnold. “I was a friend of Helga's. I just wanted to know....”

 

“What?” Patrick turned to face him, fury marring his all-American good looks. “What could you possibly want to know?”

 

Arnold could see Helga out of the corner of his eye. Why were they there?

 

“I wanted to know what she was like with you,” Arnold shrugged, helplessly. “Like, was she okay? Was she in trouble? I figured you'd know.”

 

Patrick's expression softened, and he glanced around at the kids on the field who were watching them now with morbid childish interest.

 

“Over here,” he said, beckoning Arnold (and by extension, Helga) into the nearby dugout.

 

When the kids had stopped paying attention and went back to playing baseball, Patrick started talking.

 

“We never dated,” he began. “I told the police that, and it's true. I wanted to, but she wasn't interested. Said she was too young for me. She was right.”

 

“Why did you want to date her?” Arnold asked.

 

Patrick shrugged and smiled.

 

“She wasn't like any other girl I knew,” he said. “She was different. Special. Real smart, didn't take any bullshit....how could you not fall for a girl like that?”

 

He might have expected Helga to look pleased with this praise, but she didn't. She just looked sad.

 

“Hell, I wasn't the only one,” Patrick continued with a rueful laugh. “I was just the one she put up with. We did some stuff together besides baseball. We went to the movies, ice-cream after big games, that kind of thing. I brought her home for dinner a few times. My mom loved her.”

 

“Sounds like you were dating to me,” Arnold said.

 

“That's what the police said,” Patrick laughed. “But it wasn't like that. She just seemed like she needed it.”

 

“Needed it?”

 

Patrick broke off, looked over the field at the kids pitching and swinging as hard as their half-grown limbs could manage.

 

“I've been in the Little League since I was ten,” he said. “Junior coach when I was too old to play. This is a good crop of kids this year, but there's always one. See that one?”

 

He pointed at a little boy wearing a catcher's mitt, skinny and short with a head of unkempt curly hair.

 

“That's the one that comes to baseball because he's got nowhere else to go,” Patrick said. “There's always one. Helga was that one.”

 

Arnold blinked, and looked at the boy a little closer until he could see what Patrick was seeing. Mismatched socks and a hole in the collar of his shirt. A head shorter than everyone else. Eyes that were sunken in from lack of sleep.

 

“Officially we're not supposed to interfere unless we notice something we can report to CPS,” Patrick continued. “We do what we can here, keep an eye on them. 'Course I wasn't old enough to do anything for Helga...but how could I not? I mean, she had friends and all, but she had no-one that treated her like she was special. And she _was_ special.”

 

Helga was rubbing the spot on her head with increasing irritation.

 

“All I did was take her out a few times, treat her to things, walked her home after practice. She deserved that much, right?”

 

“Yes, she did,” Arnold agreed, swallowing down the lump in his throat.

 

Even Patrick looked like he wanted to cry. But the head coach finally took notice that his junior was shirking, and called him over.

 

“I suppose, though, it's only the special ones that disappear like that, right?” he finished before walking away.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Five**

 

… **..**

 

“I want to go to school with you tomorrow.”

 

Arnold started, and hoped she hadn't noticed. He had just come up from doing repairs on the pipes in the boiler room to find that Helga had done his English assignment on Shakespeare.

 

“I was supposed to be doing Othello....” he said weakly, hoping she'd forget what she had asked for.

 

“The Henriad is better,” she tossed out casually. “If you get asked any questions just talk about Falstaff. Everyone loves Falstaff. Anyway, I want to go to school with you tomorrow.”

 

“Why?”

 

“I want to see everyone,” she shrugged. “That half-second look at the back of Rhonda's head got me curious.”

 

It would be disastrous, Arnold could feel it. Helga would know he had lied about Phoebe, and there's no telling what it would do to her incorporeal form. Something about the hills had shaken her, if she saw how Phoebe was now maybe she'd blink out of existence altogether. How could he take that risk?

 

“Isn't the school a bit far away? It's kind of risky...” he said.

 

“Maybe. But maybe Phoebe will be able to see me like you can,” Helga argued. “Or maybe she knows something. Have you asked her anything?”

 

She had a point. If anyone knew anything about Helga before she vanished, it would have been Phoebe.

 

“Fine,” he said after a long silence. She'd find out sooner or later, anyway.

 

She grinned and flopped down on the blanket nest on the sofa. Arnold noticed for the first time that the hem of her pink sundress, bordered by a girlish touch of eyelet lace, had a ragged tear at the back. It exposed a patch of bare leg which had a matching tear in the skin, a long wound that looked like it was still healing. The sight of it, and the grim thought that someone or something had ripped into her skin in this seldom-seen vulnerable place, brought a sudden lump to his throat that he tried hard to swallow.

 

“This is really good,” he said, gesturing to the (surprisingly thorough) report on the exploits of Prince Hal and Sir John Falstaff. “Better than I would have done on Othello...”

 

“Well, you were hardly going to get it finished at this time, were you?”

 

Indeed it was almost midnight, and he had only written a handful of words before he went downstairs to fix the plumbing.

 

“I was going to get up early and do it at breakfast,” he admitted. “I owe you one.”

 

She shrugged. Having noticed the tear on the back of the dress, his eyes now found something else; the left strap of her dress had been torn off, and was hanging across her chest. Usually the white sweater covered this spot. Distantly he wondered how close he would have to get to see other signs of a struggle.

 

“Why are you doing these repairs anyway? Shouldn't you have a plumber or something come in...?”

 

“This house is really old,” he explained. “Technically all the pipes and wiring should be replaced, but if we did that we might as well bulldoze the whole place and build it again from scratch. Hell, it'd be less expensive. Grandpa used to do all the repairs but his arthritis is pretty bad these days.”

 

Arthritis, and a stroke that had scared Phil halfway to his grave three years before. He'd been a lot less sprightly since, and healthy as he was for a man his age he was more nervous these days. Arnold had slowly taken on more and more responsibility for the boarding house until he was practically running it himself in between school and homework.

 

“I get that, but you're still a kid,” she told him sternly. “You can't do all of this and school too. When do you get time to do stupid teenage stuff?”

 

“I don't, really,” was his answer.

 

…..

 

The year after Helga vanished was a hard one. It was like a gloom had fallen over Hillwood itself, now that it had been put on the map by this nasty incident. Businesses closed or moved, tourism dropped, kids weren't allowed to wander around all over the town like they had done for years.

 

The boarding house was hit by a series of problems. The money they had raised to replace the old boiler and put some new insulation on the roof had been stolen by Oskar, who fled across state lines and wasn't heard from again. His long-suffering wife, heavily pregnant with her first child, moved back home to her parents' place in Nebraska, and the boarding house lost the small but much needed rent she brought in.

 

Ernie had a sudden heart attack on the job and died on the way to the hospital. To complicate matters, he had left his room in the boarding house in bad need of repair and they lost six months and a good chunk of their money fixing it up before they could rent it out again. The new boarders who took both of the unoccupied rooms kept to themselves, and the house lost much of the familial air that had sustained it.

 

They still had the rent from their tenants, mostly paid on time, but the boarding house was becoming more and more decrepit and it was costing more and more money to keep it ticking. Arnold spent most of that summer trying to teach himself advanced plumbing and electrical skills.

 

Gradually, his friends stopped calling him. Softball games in the alley were conducted without him, and even if they had asked he would have had to say no. No hanging out on the pier or in the park, he didn't have time. Rushing home after school to make sure nothing else had broken, and nobody expected him to stick around anyway. Gerald was loyal, for a while, but he had other things on his mind. One day Arnold turned thirteen and realized he had no friends left.

 

He muddled through middle school, and when high school started he at least tried to make friends with some of the other kids on the outside. These were kids who had been left back a grade or brought forward, transfer students and the overscheduled prodigies. They never went to each other's houses or met up on weekends, they were just friends for the few hours it took for the school day to be over.

 

And now, college was looming on the horizon, and Arnold just knew he wasn't going. No matter how good his grades were or even if he could win a scholarship as his form tutor hinted, if he left it would all fall apart. How could he leave?

 

…..

 

Helga jumped sprightly out of the bike's basket, clearly eager to get into the classroom even as Arnold dragged his feet. She followed him, impatiently tapping her feet, as he took books from his locker and exchanged a dull greeting with Parker, one of his school-time friends. She clearly didn't recognize Gerald, skulking in his usual spot in front of the door whistling at girls walking by.

 

As always, Rhonda was tapping at breakneck speed on her phone. Helga tiptoed up behind her to peer at what she was writing, and frowned when she saw it. When Rhonda finished whatever it was she was typing, she pulled out a small mirror and reapplied a thick coat of lip gloss.

 

“What's 'instagram'?” Helga asked, returning to Arnold's side.

 

He just shook his head and shrugged.

 

Harold blustered in on the heels of some of his equally boorish friends, slinking towards the back of the room with a lot of unecessary noise.

 

“He's thinner, at least,” Helga muttered.

 

The classroom filled slowly as the second bell rang, and Arnold began to think he had a stroke of luck and Phoebe would be absent. But she came in on the next wave and he didn't dare look at Helga for her reaction.

 

She looked worse than ever, if anything. Her sweater was stained, and she had pulled her hair back in a tight bun that only made her look more gaunt. A scab above her lip was healed over and flaking. She bumped against Rhonda's desk on the way to hers, knocking Rhonda's phone-tapping askew.

 

“For God's sake,” Rhonda growled in her cut-glass tone. “Go be an eyesore away from me, got it?”

 

A wave of laughter began from the girls gathered near the door and the boys in the back took it up, louder and cruder. Phoebe mumbled an apology and slunk to her desk, red-faced and on the verge of tears.

 

Arnold could practically _feel_ Helga's rage radiating from her in waves. He looked over just in time to see her arm swipe through Rhonda's face, catching her phone with the tips of her fingers. The phone clattered to the ground. Rhonda picked it up, trying for nonchalance, but her face had gone pale and suddenly she looked frightened. Her eyes darted around the room, looking for something.

 

The teacher walked in at that point, and the laughter died down. Arnold felt Helga's eyes boring into him the whole lesson.

 

…..

 

He got an A+ on his report, thanks to Helga, which made him all the more guilt-ridden when she followed him into the seldom-used fourth floor bathroom and vented her anger at him.

 

“You lied to me,” she hissed. “You said she was fine!”

 

“I know,” he mumbled. “I'm sorry.”

 

“This is why you didn't want me to come with you,” she said. “Why didn't you tell me?”

 

“What good would it have done?” he asked her. “You would have wanted to do something about it, and you can't. I didn't want to upset you.”

 

She seemed solid enough, upset as she was. Even more solid, actually. She knew he had a point, but she refused to say it, storming over to the window and throwing it open with a flourish instead.

 

“Well, we have to do something,” she ground out. “I'm not leaving her like this. What happened to her?”

 

“She kind of fell apart after you disappeared,” Arnold told her.

 

“That can't be the only reason,” Helga argued. “Her mom and dad would have gotten counselling for her.”

 

“There was a ….thing with Gerald....”

 

“Thing? What thing?”

 

…..

 

Gerald and Phoebe had been half-dating, not fully in a relationship but spending a lot of time together, when they were eleven. There were times when it was more common to see Phoebe with Gerald than with Helga. Helga didn't seem bothered by it, as far as anyone knew.

 

Arnold had listened to Gerald talk about Phoebe for hours, how smart she was, how pretty and how unlike any of the other girls. Things he used to do with Arnold he now did with Phoebe, and Arnold was happy for him. Happy for them both.

 

In the aftermath of Helga's vanishing and Phoebe's breakdown, he stopped talking about her so much. If he mentioned her in passing while recounting some story, he doubled down and changed the subject. Arnold knew Phoebe had called him a lot during that time, and he knew Gerald let his phone ring out until she stopped calling. He stopped even looking at her as they walked past each other in the hall.

 

Arnold had always thought Gerald had his flaws but was a decent guy. He was relieved when Gerald stopped calling him too, because he could hardly keep the disgust out of his voice when he talked to or about his former best friend.

 

…..

 

Helga had been quiet all night, pacing around Arnold's room restlessly. He was trying to study the operator's manual for the fuse box in the basement but he couldn't help watching her move around. More and more he was noticing little things he hadn't seen before, tiny possible clues.

 

The sweater had one sleeve rolled up, the other drooped down over her knuckles. A hair tie was wrapped around her arm.

 

The sundress had another tear, at the waist, hidden by the sweater unless she was moving around.

 

The one shoe had grass stains, the laces were untied. She wasn't wearing socks.

 

A blue bra strap was just about visible in the place that would have been covered by the broken strap of the dress.

 

Her hair was matted a little at the back. Some of it had been cut at an awkward angle.

 

“Ah!” she cried suddenly, and he jumped. “I just remembered....”

 

“Remembered?” he said, hopefully.

 

“Not anything recent,” she told him. “But something that might help Phoebe. I need you to give something to her.”

 

“Sure,” he said, although he didn't know if Phoebe would even talk to him long enough to give her anything. “What is it?”

 

“It's at my house. We have to go there first. Did anyone new move in?”

 

“No, it's been abandoned. It's boarded up.”

 

“Perfect,” she said, as though she hadn't just heard that her childhood home was abandoned. It just proved how few good memories she had of the place.

 

They waited until midnight to make the trip over. Helga phased through the back door and let Arnold in with his flashlight. The beam of light glanced over tipped-over glass bottles and empty food containers, old newspapers and black bags of trash piled up in the corners. The house smelled of decay, but it didn't seem to bother Helga in the slightest. For Arnold, who sometimes found himself tearful when thinking about how bad the boarding house was getting, it was incredibly sad.

 

Helga went straight for the stairs and he followed her up, and then into her old bedroom. She phased through the closet door and he heard her rummage around in there, talking softly to herself.

 

Her room was even sadder than the kitchen. Her bed was unmade, probably just as she'd left it, in a faded old comforter and a bare pillow. Her desk was coated with dust, decorated by two small ornaments that had probably been gifts from Phoebe. There was a single rag doll on the windowsill, a handful of old books on the shelf, a worn out rug on the floor and a hairbrush poking out from under the bed. These were meagre signs that a young girl had lived in this room.

 

“Found it!” she called from inside the closet. “Open the door!”

 

He opened the closet door and she pushed out a medium-sized wooden box with a sliding lid. The logo of a wineseller was embossed on the front.

 

“What's in it?” he asked, reaching for the lid.

 

Helga smacked his hand, lightly but hard enough to sting just a bit.

 

“Not your business,” she told him smoothly. “It's for Phoebe. You can't tell her what's in here, she has to see it for herself.”

 

“Okay,” Arnold muttered. “Is she going to know what to do with it?”

 

“Of course. Tell her that Helga wanted her to have it.”

 


	6. Chapter 6

Missing

 

Chapter Six

 

Apologies for the delay, I had to take a long trip away. I'm back now, services will resume.

 

…..

 

He was checking his phone for the sixth time when she came back into his room, damp and smelling of that rose-scented shower stuff his Grandma always bought. He glanced over at her. She was looking more and more solid with every day that passed. Her clothes were starting to look pretty grubby...

 

“Did she answer you?”

 

He shook his head at her question.

 

“I don't even know if this is still her number, to be honest,” Arnold told her. “And she wasn't in school yesterday....”

 

Helga grumbled under her breath and flopped across her blanket nest. Along with looking more solid, she looked visibly tired. Arnold knew she'd been restless since they retrieved the mystery box from her house, and she'd been doing most of his homework so he could catch up on his own rest after running repairs on the boarding house. And sleeping in the same clothes day in day out couldn't have been comfortable....

 

He was nervous about asking, because it could so easily be taken the wrong way, but he had to ask.

 

“Maybe I should put your clothes in the washer,” he began.

 

Helga's head rolled to the side to regard him suspiciously, raising one eyebrow.

 

“If you need to shower you probably need clean clothes too,” he continued with a feigned casual shrug. “Or is it different for ghosts?”

 

“No,” she mumbled. “It wasn't like this before, I think. I didn't feel the dirt...I didn't feel much of anything. I do feel kinda gross now though...”

 

“I can get you something else tomorrow,” Arnold offered. “And I can give you something of mine for tonight. They probably won't fit too good but it's better than nothing.”

 

He rummaged around for an old t-shirt and sweatpants to give her and left the room as she changed. She dropped the clothes into a pillow case and passed it out to him, and he tiptoed past the rooms of the sleeping residents to the laundry room.

 

Although his offer had been motivated by genuine concern for her comfort, he had an additional motive. If he examined her clothes, perhaps he could find out more. The tears in her dress had gnawed at his mind, and he needed to take a closer look. Gingerly he removed each garment and held it up to the light, peering closely.

 

The pink sundress, tears and all, wasn't that remarkable. It had grass stains on the back, but Helga had been a tomboy and rolling around in the grass wasn't out of character for her. The lace hem could have been torn off through sheer clumsiness. The broken dress strap, however, was a little chilling. He tugged hard on the one that was still intact, and hard as he pulled it didn't budge. The strap couldn't have popped loose on its own, it would have needed a lot of strength to yank it away. The tear at the back of the skirt was clean-edged, made by something sharp, not by brambles or branches.

 

The sweater had no tears or holes, but it was stretched to shapelessness and three buttons were missing. Some sort of decoration near the collar had been torn off, leaving the loose threads and the imprint behind.

 

When it came to the underwear she had put in the pillowcase, he balked at the idea of looking too closely at something so intimate, but who knew what he would miss if he didn't?The panties were normal fare for an eleven-year-old girl (although far too small for anyone older than that), the kind you bought in multipacks at the store. White with small pink flowers and otherwise plain. Remarkably clean.

 

The bra, however, was what really disturbed him.

 

It was too big for her, first of all. He knew enough about breasts and he had taken enough cursory glances at Helga's figure to know she wasn't a 36D. A B cup, a grudging C at the very most. Secondly, it was far too adult even for a sixteen-year-old. The blue fabric was so sheer it was almost completely see-through and it snapped open at the front. It was for the purposes of display, not support. He'd seen bras like this, but only in pilfered nudie magazines and occasional internet porn pop-ups.

 

Helga had been wearing these clothes when she disappeared. She'd been wearing these clothes when she died. At eleven years old, she had died wearing lingerie made for an adult woman.

 

Arnold put the clothes on to wash, and sick to his stomach he made his way back upstairs. He had a feeling Helga would be asleep when he came back up, and was glad to see he was right. He couldn't imagine looking her in the eye right now.

 

The sweatpants fit her okay, but the t-shirt seemed simultaneously too big and too small. It piled up around her stomach and tucked under as she moved around in her sleep, exposing a sliver of stomach, pale as milk. Arnold sighed and tiptoed over to her to tuck her in, but a small flash of rust on that pale skin made him stop before he picked up the blanket.

 

The edge of a wound darted out from under the t-shirt, knife-like. It was narrow but it looked deep. The nausea rose in Arnold's throat again, but he couldn't stop himself. He had to know. His fingers gently took up the hem of the t-shirt and carefully, slowly, pulled it upwards.

 

The scar passed her navel, ghosted across her sternum, rose and fell over her ribs and finally stopped just on the underside of her left breast. It tilted to the left like a tree branch. The skin around it was bruised. Right beside where it ended, a set of finger-sized bruises were stamped onto the softly-risen mound of her breast. He pulled the t-shirt back down, cold sweat soaking through his shirt.

 

As he struggled to get his breath under control, he saw something else he hadn't seen before. Partially hidden by her hairline, another scar was stamped onto Helga's skull. It was shaped like a star, about the size of an egg. Something had hit her there, hard. He had a feeling he was looking at the fatal wound.

 

He tucked the blankets around her, practically swaddled her in them, resisting the urge to kiss her forehead, as if that could make anything better. It was only when he put his head down on his own pillow that he felt the tears on his face.

 

…..

 

She was still asleep when he left for school. His Grandpa had been in the best mood he'd seen him in years, probably because it was the closest the boarding house had been to full working mode in years. Plus his grandson was suddenly getting straight As when he'd been pulling Bs for most of the semester.

 

Arnold had always known Helga was ferociously intelligent, not quite as obviously genius as Phoebe but a bit too smart for her own good. It hadn't quite hit him just how smart she was until she insisted on doing all of his homework after taking over his Shakespeare assignment. It was pretty amazing considering she hadn't even made it to high school, and thinking about that just made him sad all over again.

 

As he locked up his bike, he glanced around for Phoebe, but he couldn't see her anywhere. She was absent a lot, it wasn't exactly a surprise, but still....

 

“Hi Arnold,” a reedy voice croaked from behind him.

 

Arnold held back a wince as he turned to greet Eugene. He was one of the few people who still talked to Eugene, and sometimes wished he could just cut people out of his life as easily as Gerald and Rhonda did. Looking at Eugene was painful.

 

Even now, when he was deemed healthy enough to attend school, he looked like a strong wind would topple him over. His eyes were already watering and his nose was red.

 

“Hey Eugene,” Arnold said, rummaging awkwardly in his backpack. “I didn't know you were out yet.”

 

“Released early for good behavior,” Eugene joked with a thin, wheezy laugh. “Seriously though, Dr Elbaum says with the good weather I should be okay to come back for midterms at least.”

 

It was incredible he'd even made it as far as midterms. He had attended less that 20% of the year's classes.

 

“Isn't that the one thing you should be trying to miss?” Arnold quipped.

 

Eugene spluttered in a half-laugh, half-cough, gulping in air with effort. Just as Arnold was wishing he'd stop, he finally caught sight of Phoebe, hurrying in through the cafeteria entrance. He tried to excuse himself to catch up with her, but Eugene was still gasping for breath and trying to speak.

 

By the time he managed to get away, the bell rang.

 

…..

 

Arnold watched Phoebe all day, which was probably creepy and she could probably tell he was staring at her, but he was determined not to let her slip away again. His history teacher dropped his assignment and a compliment on the quality of his recent work, and Phoebe briefly turned to look at him curiously. He smiled at her, but she frowned and turned away.

 

He finally caught her at the end of the day, escaping through the empty cafeteria again.

 

“Phoebe!” he called.

 

She sped up to a half-run.

 

“Phoebe, wait! I just need to talk to you...” he called again, running after her (and feeling like a creep for it.)

 

“I don't want to talk to you,” she hissed back, throwing open the cafeteria door with a loud crash.

 

The door nearly swung back and hit him in the face, but he caught it just in time. He caught up with her just as she was crossing the hill behind the school.

 

“Look, just hear me out and I won't bother you again,” he gasped, breathless.

 

She ground to a stop, took a deep breath, and pinned him with a hard glare.

 

“Fine. You have one minute.”

 

How was he supposed to explain everything in one minute? Even if she believed him about Helga suddenly materializing in his house, even if she believed him that he was trying to find out what happened to her, how was he....

 

“Thirty seconds,” she growled.

 

“Okay, okay,” he blurted. “Look, I was thinking about Helga a lot lately....and I was looking around for information, you know, stuff the police might have missed, because who knows where she might have gone better than her friends, right?”

 

Phoebe's face was already turning red with anger, but she was silent.

 

“Anyway, I went to her old house to see if I could find anything, and I did find something. I think she'd want you to have it.”

 

The anger drained out of her face, and suddenly she looked exhausted.

 

“Why are you doing this, Arnold?”

 

_Because she's haunting me._

 

“Why?” he stuttered, shuffling on the spot. “Why wouldn't I? Everyone else has just forgotten her...”

 

“That's not what I mean. Why now? You never gave a damn about her when she was alive, why do you care now?”

 

“That's not true,” he said, hurt. “Of course I cared...”

 

“No, you didn't. Nobody did, except me. And I was a pretty poor excuse for a friend. Spare me your guilt now, I don't need any more.”

 

She stalked away and he stared after her, speechless. Cursing under his breath, he hurried after her again and grabbed her arm. She pushed him away, half-punching his arm in the process, but he barely felt it.

 

“Just....let me give you what I found, okay? I promise I'll leave you alone...I'll take it back if you don't want it. But I really, _really_ think she'd want you to have it.”

 

Her frown wavered, and for a moment she looked much, much younger than sixteen.

 

“Okay.”

 

…..

 

Arnold stopped at the local department store on the way back. He had some money saved up, Phil had always given him a small allowance when he could afford it and he rarely had time to spend it on anything besides spare computer parts, pizza on study nights and very rare trips to the movies. He had almost five hundred dollars in his bank account. He took out two hundred, just in case.

 

The idea of picking out clothes (and underwear) for Helga made him feel a bit squirmy, so he looked for the shop assistant with the most motherly aura and made up a lie on the spot.

 

“My cousin's staying with us for a bit,” he told the woman, a bosomy middle-aged lady with a helmet of honey-toned hair. “Her house burned down and most of her clothes went with it, so she kinda needs...everything?”

 

“Poor thing,” the woman cooed. “And how nice of you to be looking after her! Roughly how tall is she? What colours does she prefer?”

 

“She's about five-four,” he shrugged. “Kind of thin, she likes pink and white.”

 

The woman left him in a chair outside the changing room and returned half an hour later with a bag of jeans, leggings, tank tops and sweaters, one sundress remarkably similar to the one Helga already had, two loose blouses, a few packs of underwear and three sports bras. Two pairs of ballet pumps sat on top of the bag.

 

“That should hold her over for now,” the woman smiled down at him, happy to have done a good deed. “And it's all on sale.”

 

It ended up costing seventy-five dollars, far less than he thought it would (he'd always assumed girl's clothes were stupidly expensive.) Two triumphs (sort of) in one day had him feeling cheerful.

 

He quailed a little when he arrived home to find that someone (his Grandma, probably) had taken Helga's clothes out of the washer and hung them out to dry. He would be lucky if his Grandma was the only person who had noticed a random young girl's clothes in the laundry when there was no young girls living there. Grandma probably wouldn't even think about it. He grabbed them off of the drying rack and shoved them into his backpack.

 

Helga was still sleeping when he went to his room, and now he was beginning to worry. It was approaching twenty-four hours since she fell asleep...was this normal? What was normal for ghosts?

 

He left the bag of clothes beside her nest and turned on his PC, watching her for movement out of the corner of his eye.

 

 

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Seven**

 

… **..**

 

Phoebe entered the sixth grade by herself, because on summer vacation she begged her parents to let Helga go with them on their trip to the biggest water park in the United States at the time, and while she was there she picked up a bad case of measles

 

_(which lead to Phoebe's mom angrily ranting down the phone to her sister about how no kid got measles in this day and age unless they weren't vaccinated and how the hell did the school overlook Helga missing **all of her shots** )_

 

and had to be quarantined for the first few weeks of school. It should have been fine, but on day two she accidentally kicked Suzanne Fischer's not-at-all-suitable-for-middle-school handbag in the corridor and Suzanne was decidedly not the forgiving type.

 

Nobody really liked Suzanne, but she was 'popular' all the same. There was a sense that her friends really only laughed when she knocked over Phoebe's books or tripped her in the hall or tossed her clothes out the window after gym class because if they didn't, Suzanne would turn on them next.

 

It was silly, too, to be intimidated by Suzanne's weak pranks. That airy little 'Oops' that followed as she messed with Phoebe's stuff in plain view of everyone got old real quick, and nobody really laughed except for Suzanne's cronies. But still, every time it happened the atmosphere around them got tense and everyone was looking at Phoebe, even the ones trying to pretend they weren't paying attention. They were waiting for Phoebe to cry, and although she didn't want to give them the satisfaction she let more than a few tears fall.

 

She'd never been bullied before, not really. How was she supposed to react?

 

By the end of the month though, Helga was back, looking no worse for wear and just a little grumpy at having had to miss Little League and being stuck inside for so long. She had brought her baseball bat with her because she was itching to get back out on the diamond. They were chatting away and it was just like things were back to normal, and Phoebe forgot all about Suzanne Fischer and her campaign against her.

 

Suzanne upped the ante appropriately, catching Phoebe's bookbag that had been sitting neatly by her desk with her foot and kicking it across the room, scattering the contents, books and pencils and the contents of Phoebe's lunch, all over the classroom floor. Suzanne and the cronies laughed, everyone else took a cursory uncomfortable glance and turned away.

 

“Oops,” Suzanne giggled sweetly.

 

The humiliation was twice as hard to take now that it had happened in front of Phoebe's best friend. She concentrated hard on keeping the tears away as she gathered what she could into her bag as fast as she could. She didn't even see Helga pick up the bat, and only looked up when she heard the crash of metal hitting wood.

 

The entire room was tense in a whole new way. When Phoebe looked up, she saw Helga staring Suzanne down over the sizable dent in Suzanne's desk. Her unsuitable-for-middle-school handbag was spilling its contents over the side of the desk.

 

“Guess my hand slipped,” Helga said quietly but with a tone that could cut through steel. “How goddamn clumsy of me.”

 

Suzanne was white as a sheet under her layer of childishly-applied bronzer. Her friends were open-mouthed, didn't know where to look. Everyone else seemed to take a silent sigh of relief, like some balance had been restored. Helga took her seat, tossing her baseball bat under her desk and asked Phoebe about her history notes like nothing had happened.

 

It hadn't occurred to Phoebe until then that she had always been a prime target for bullies; she was small for her age, meek, markedly different from other kids by her shortsightedness and ethnic background and a favourite of the teachers. But she had always been protected from them by Helga's loyalty and fearlessness. Her very presence was a shield.

 

Suzanne made two more attempts to pick on Phoebe, but both attempts resulted in Helga coming for her three times as hard. In the end, she went to her parents and demanded to be transferred to a different school, one with easier targets.

 

…..

 

Arnold checked his phone again, he could feel Helga peering over his shoulder impatiently.

 

She'd finally woken up just an hour before they were due to go meet Phoebe, and Arnold was on edge. Her sleeping for so long had worried him, and remembering how she'd disappeared on that trip to the farmland he was afraid she might do it again. Plus that scar across her sternum was burned into his mind, along with the one on her temple that he could barely look away from now.

 

“Is she late?” Helga grumbled above him. “What time did you say?”

 

“She's a little late,” Arnold told her, a little more gruffly than he intended.

 

Helga sighed and slumped over beside the box. The new clothes did a lot to make her look more solid, more _real_ somehow than the ragged sundress. The pink blouse she was wearing had little cat heads on it, and along with a pale green sweater and dark jeans, her hair pinned back with two small braids, she could have been any Instagram-happy teenager, any guy's anonymously pretty girlfriend, any neighborhood's friendly babysitter. Not the notorious probable murder victim haunting Hillwood's collective consciousness.

 

The school was pretty much empty, except for the custodians clearing up the day's mess. They'd be locking up soon, and Arnold would have dragged the box (and Helga) to school for nothing.

 

But finally, just as he was about to suggest they leave, a door clattered open and Phoebe shuffled up to him.

 

“I'm here,” she announced wearily.

 

Despite herself, she did look slightly better than normal. Maybe she'd made an effort out of respect for Helga's memory. She was still in dark clothes, still ill-shaped and baggy, but at least they were clean and her hair was tied back.

 

“Okay,” Arnold said, rising to his feet and putting the box on the cafeteria table. “Here it is.”

 

“What's in it?” she asked, making no move to even touch the box.

 

“I don't know,” Arnold shrugged. “It's for you?”

 

Phoebe frowned.

 

“That doesn't make any sense. How do you know it's for me?”

 

Arnold groaned quietly and tried to think of an excuse, but his mind was blank. Helga tiptoed up and whispered in his ear.

 

“Tell her you went to see that love potion woman,” she told him. “She'll know what it means.”

 

“....I went to see that woman,” he mumbled. “The....love potion woman?”

 

He half-expected Phoebe to roll her eyes and ask what that was supposed to mean, but instead she visibly stiffened, mouth falling slightly open in surprise.

 

“She told you to find the box...” Helga whispered.

 

“She told me to find the box....” Arnold continued.

 

“....and give it to Helga's best friend.”

 

“....and give it to Helga's best friend. And she said if I looked inside....”

 

“.....uh.....your fingers would turn green and fall off.”

 

“....my fingers would turn green and fall off.”

 

To his surprise, Phoebe chuckled softly.

 

“That sounds about right,” she said, finally reaching for the box. “This had better be good....”

 

Phoebe reached for the tape holding the box closed and ripped it off, taking the finish of the box with it. Arnold stepped a little closer to see for himself what was inside. He didn't know what he was expecting, really. Helga's last will and testament? A collection of some sort? Jewelry and make-up?

 

It was none of those things. Inside was a stack of small pink notebooks. They looked vaguely familiar, but Arnold couldn't recall seeing them in Helga's possession before. Were they really hers...? He looked up at Phoebe....

 

….who had gone so pale he worried she would faint. Her hands trembled violently as she reached for the notebook at the very top, trembled so hard she could barely open it to see lines of Helga's neat handwriting covering every corner of the pages.

 

“Are you okay?” he asked, reaching out to gently take the book from her, but she slapped his hand away, shaking her head.

 

“You can't look at these,” Phoebe said quietly, as though from very far away. “She wouldn't want you to...”

 

Arnold glanced at Helga, who nodded and shrugged at him simultaneously.

 

“I got these for her,” Phoebe said, not really to Arnold or even to herself. “Every year on her birthday and Christmas. She never wanted anything else. She went through them so fast, I always ended up getting her a new one....I didn't think she kept them all....”

 

Something had burst inside of Phoebe, and she sank to the floor sobbing, clutching the little pink notebook hard as though she was afraid someone would try to take it from her.

 

“It's not fair...” Arnold could just about hear her gasping between sobs. “...she didn't deserve this...”

 

Arnold had never been good with crying girls _(honestly, was anyone?)_ so he stood there awkwardly watching her cry, wishing he could do something to comfort her but not knowing what. Until, with an exasperated huff, Helga pushed past him and threw her arms around her friend.

 

Phoebe stopped crying abruptly. Her eyes, red and sore-looking, were staring hard at the place where Helga's head was, as if she could see her.

 

Wait....

 

“What....” she gasped, trying to form words and gingerly touching _(actually touching)_ the hand Helga had on her shoulder.

 

Helga pulled back, and Phoebe stared all the harder, mouth wide open like a fish.

 

“You can see me?” Helga cried. “Pheebs!”

 

“She's talking,” Phoebe mumbled. “I can't hear....are you seeing this?”

 

“She can't hear me? What?” Helga said, turning to Arnold, and he noticed with dismay that her form was dissipating, fading in and out. She was going to vanish.

 

“Don't panic,” he tried to tell them both. “I can explain....”

 

But before he could even think of an explanation, Helga was gone.

 

…..

 

In the aftermath, her parents had done what they could for Phoebe.

 

They paid for the best counselor for her _(they wasted their money because Phoebe didn't want to talk to anyone, let alone someone who could feign sympathy for pay.)_

 

They kept TV reports and radio reports and newspapers with case details away from her _(they wasted their time because Phoebe could hear her mother on the phone with her sister talking in detail about what they thought had happened to Helga.)_

 

They made her favourite dinners, bought her clothes they would have said were too grown-up before, let her watch whatever she wanted on TV _(they wasted their efforts because all food tasted like ash now, she couldn't care less about what she wore and she couldn't take any pleasure in TV knowing what she did.)_

 

She hated to worry them, but she couldn't pull herself out of the pit. The only way she could have been happy again was to forget that she'd ever had a best friend like Helga, forget how badly she had let her down, and that wasn't going to happen any time soon.

 

She didn't deserve to be happy. She didn't deserve to wear nice clothes or eat good food or lose herself in an interesting story or do anything other than carry the guilt for the rest of her life.

 

…..

 

“....that's a lot to take in,” was all Phoebe said when Arnold was finished explaining.

 

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I'm still kind of processing it myself. I mean, if she was going to haunt somewhere, it should have been her old house, or even your house....I don't know why she ended up with me.”

 

“I can think of a few good reasons,” Phoebe said wearily, rubbing at her eyes under her glasses. “You think she wants you to find out what happened to her? She knew you were the one most likely to see it through.”

 

“You think?”

 

“Of course,” she shrugged. “You've never given up on anything. Or anyone. And look at me, I gave up on everything when she was gone....”

 

“Yeah, about that,” Arnold began, rubbing his neck awkwardly. “She followed me to school last week, and....she was really worried about you. That's why she insisted I give you the box. She wouldn't let me look inside it, just told me I had to get it to you.”

 

Phoebe chuckled, shaking her head.

 

“She never gives up either, even now,” she said, softly and with so much warmth it raised a lump in Arnold's throat. “Remember when she made Suzanne Fischer's life hell because she'd been picking on me? Helga got in so much trouble for that and she couldn't care less...I didn't deserve her. I still don't.”

 

“That's not true,” Arnold told her.

 

“Yes it is. I was a crappy friend when she needed me.”

 

He didn't know how to answer that. Silence stretched out between them, until Phoebe sighed and seemed ready to tell him something.

 

“Listen....I think, if you're serious about trying to find out what happened to her, you should know this. I already told the police when they asked me, but nobody else knows....”

 

“Okay....”

 

She took a deep breath, rubbed at her eyes again and began.

 

“Helga was acting pretty weird a couple of months before she went missing. She missed school a few times, she said she was really tired in the mornings. She said she had stomach pains, too. She didn't look good.”

 

Arnold raked through his memories of that year, and although he hadn't taken much notice at the time, he had seen that Helga was unusually pale and quiet at that time.

 

“She didn't want to go home a lot of the time....her Dad was having money problems, the beeper shop was doing badly and there were a lot of arguments. She stayed at my house a lot, but I was hanging with Gerald a lot then and I didn't see her as much. Then she said she had this place in the woods....”

 

The woods she had been pointing at when she vanished the first time.

 

“....it was some sort of cave? I don't know, she wanted me to come up and see it some time but I never did....anyway, she used to stay up there when she didn't want to go home. It was pretty deep in the woods, it took her ages to get out there so I gave her my old bike to help her make it in on time for school. Her cellphone didn't have much signal out there, she always texted me to let me know she was safe as soon as she got out.”

 

No cave had ever been mentioned in anything he had read about the case. It should have been crucial evidence. Why wasn't it?

 

“The day before she went missing she called me. She was really upset but she wouldn't tell me why over the phone. She said something about a stick and that she was going to talk to Officer Plaskett...”

 

Officer Plaskett. That nice plainclothes policeman with a fatherly air who came to their school once and told all the kids if they were in trouble to call in and see him.

 

“....she wanted to stay with me...but I told her she couldn't.”

 

Phoebe broke off with a sob, but when Arnold tried to put a comforting hand on her shoulder she savagely brushed it off.

 

“I told her she couldn't because Gerald was coming over to study! She was upset and she didn't want to go home and I blew her off for some stupid boy!”

 

Now it made sense. Phoebe had been punishing herself ever since. As sorry as he felt for her, he also felt a little stab of anger that she was alive and well enough to cry about her guilt, which was more than Helga got.

 

_Yes, you should feel bad._

 

And that was probably unfair, because Phoebe had been an eleven-year-old girl, and eleven-year-old girls did stupid things for the sake of boys all the time.

 

“You know she wouldn't want you to beat yourself up over it,” he told her, a touch coldly. “You know her better than that, right? If you want to make up for that stupid mistake, than help me.”

 

Phoebe sniffled, and looked over at him properly.

 

“Help me find out who took her. Then she can move on, and so can we.”

 

She nodded, wiping her eyes on her sweater sleeve.

 

…..

 

Helga was at his house, as he had hoped, waiting patiently on the stoop.

 

“That went pretty well,” he said to her.

 

“Why couldn't she hear me?” Helga wondered, frowning up at him from the stoop.

 

“Well, she's agreed to help me investigate from here on, so maybe that'll change. She's coming over tomorrow, we have a new lead.”

 

“What lead?”

 

“Something about a cave in the woods, and a stick.”

 

“That's cryptic,” she grumbled. “What kind of stick?”

 

Even wondering about it sent a chill running down Arnold's spine. The starburst mark on her temple, the possible fatal wound, how big and heavy would a stick have to be to inflict that on a young girl's skull? And wielded by how much force, by what kind of person?

 

He had a sinking feeling it was just going to get worse from here.

 

 

 

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Eight**

 

I wish I could have gotten this out earlier, but thanks to a storm the house lost power for three days and left me a bit stranded. Ah, well.

 

I have been reading the reviews and I very much appreciate them, a heartfelt thank you to those of you who have taken the time to write to me. Every comment I get spurs me to get the next chapter out as soon as I can.

 

…..

 

Arnold was so jumpy even his Grandmother noticed.

 

“Slow down there, hombre,” she told him solemnly. “Coyotes are still in the den....”

 

He choked a little on the bacon he'd been stuffing into his mouth and chewed more slowly, washing it down with a gulp of coffee.

 

“Sorry, Grandma,” he gasped. “I'm in kind of a hurry...”

 

“You're always in a hurry these days,” his grandfather remarked, but there was an amused twinkle in his eye. “Not running around after some dame, are ya?”

 

_Yes. Sort of._

 

“No, nothing like that,” he demurred, but as if on cue the doorbell rang.

 

Phoebe.

 

That twinkle of amusement only grew when Phoebe walked into the kitchen, tapped her foot impatiently and asked if Arnold was ready to go. He ushered her out of there and up the stairs, Phil's laughter following his steps.

 

“Is she here?” Phoebe asked when they were in his room, eyes darting around trying to pick up a faint sense of her best friend's spirit.

 

“She's in the shower,” he said, shoving a printed topography map into his shoulder-bag. “You look....good.”

 

If he'd phrased it any other way he was worried she'd take it as a come-on, but as it was she scowled anyway. She _did_ look good; her clothes were clean, a simple print sweater in a light shade of blue and jeans that actually fit her properly. Her hair was braided and wrapped around her head like a crown. Even her glasses looked polished. The difference a day made was remarkable.

 

“I didn't know ghosts take showers,” she said.

 

“Neither did I,” he shrugged. “And she uses up all the hot water.”

 

Phoebe smiled then, genuinely.

 

“Yeah, sounds about right. She did that all the time at my place, too.”

 

Arnold felt a little less on edge now. With Phoebe around maybe Helga wouldn't vanish before they got to the woods. Maybe she'd feel more grounded with her best friend there. Still, he had a small, cold ache at the pit of his stomach. Drowning it in bacon and coffee hadn't worked.

 

The door clattered open and Helga walked in.

 

“Pheebs!” she cried, delighted. She threw her arms around her in excitement.

 

“Is she here? I felt something....” Phoebe asked Arnold, looking wildly around the room.

 

“Yeah, she's...right in front of you.”

 

Both of their faces crumpled in disappointment. It only lasted a moment on Helga though, as she went to Arnold's desk, scribbled a hurried note across some printer paper and handed it to Phoebe. Phoebe took it gingerly (to her it must have looked like it was floating) and read it.

 

Then they both simultaneously burst into fits of the kind of high-pitched laughter only girls were capable of.

 

“Oh God,” Phoebe gasped, (though she was looking completely in the wrong direction. “You're terrible. You're _still_ terrible!”

 

“It didn't get any less true since I died,” Helga deadpanned, and Arnold relayed this to Phoebe to more shrieks of laughter.

 

“Right, maybe we should get going?” Arnold cut in. As nice as it was to see them connecting with each other again, he felt a little twinge of annoyance. He'd gotten used to Helga being _his,_ in a way. His secret, his housebound spirit, a person only he could speak to. He knew it was ridiculous, but he couldn't help it.

 

Phoebe was still smiling as they made their way downstairs, outside, to where the bikes were waiting. She wasn't just smiling; she was _glowing._

 

…..

 

One Monday morning, when they were eleven and almost eleven respectively, Gerald came into class and slumped across from Arnold with a heavy groan.

 

“Good weekend?” Arnold quipped.

 

“I don't get girls, man,” Gerald moaned, voice muffled by his face flat on the desk.

 

He'd been bragging the week before about going on a 'date-date' with Phoebe, not just a 'friend-sorta-date.' They were supposed to go to the movies and then one of those fancy coffee places all the college kids hung out at. He'd gotten a new shirt.

 

“What happened?” Arnold asked.

 

“Date was going great until we got to the coffee place,” Gerald began, sitting up and fussing with his hair. “Then she was texting Helga a whole bunch. Not when we were talking or anything, but like, if I got up to use the bathroom or get another coffee she'd have her phone out and she'd be texting...”

 

“What's wrong with that?” Arnold shrugged.

 

Gerald shot him a look that was probably supposed to be withering, but just looked sulky.

 

“Arnold, come on,” he said. “When you're on a date, the gal is supposed to be focused on _you,_ not her girl-friends. Anyway, she starts telling me some dumb story about what Helga and her did one time, and it was kinda killing the vibe, so I told her I wasn't into it and she freaked.”

 

That...didn't really make any sense.

 

“What did you say to her? Exact words,” Arnold asked.

 

“Man, I don't know,” Gerald groaned. “Something like I didn't want to hear about Helga. Helga drags her down...”

 

“Woah, you actually said that to her?” Arnold said, frowning.

 

“I think, yeah,” Gerald shrugged. “It's the truth. She'd be way more popular without Helga hanging off of her...”

 

Arnold couldn't believe Gerald was dumb enough to think that was true. Maybe Phoebe would have more friends, but she'd never be 'popular.' And if anything, Arnold had a sneaking suspicion that if anyone was hanging off of someone, it was Phoebe hanging off of Helga.

 

“So....she freaked.”

 

“Yep,” Gerald huffed, tapping his fingers on his desk. “Told me to take it back. I did, but she just paid for her coffee and left. Didn't even let me walk her home.”

 

…..

 

The stick was the clue that kept turning in Arnold's mind as he cycled. With Helga perched in the basket, he had a clear view of the top of her head and the starburst wound almost hidden by her hair.

 

_A tree branch. A big one. Lots of them were down in the storm._

 

But the stick had been mentioned before she went to the woods.

 

_A cane? Someone's walking stick? One of those hill-walking sticks?_

 

No CCTV footage was found of Helga after the convenience store, so if she went straight to the woods after, and Phoebe was sure she had, it would have to be a hill-walking stick. Nobody who needed a stick to walk could have made it very far into those woods.

 

_She was going to talk to Officer Plaskett about a stick. A baseball bat?_

 

No, she was proud of her bat. She wouldn't have called it a stick.

 

_Some teams practice hockey on those fields. A hockey stick?_

 

Unlikely. Hillwood was an ice hockey town.

 

_A broomstick. Or some random piece of wood her dad had lying around._

 

He recalled the black eye she had when she was ten. She said it was a baseball injury, but everyone thought _(knew)_ she was lying. A fist could have inflicted that, but so could a hard crack from a big piece of wood. Or maybe the black eye had been caused by a fist but the person beating her had moved up to using weapons on her. Maybe that was why she wanted to talk to Officer Plaskett. Maybe she had been able to shrug off a beating with fists but the stick had made her really, truly scared.

 

She was a tough girl, but even the toughest of girls had a breaking point.

 

_Lots of maybes in that story, though._

 

Officer Plaskett was out of town, and wouldn't be back until the next day. So they figured they'd tackle the woods first, try to find Helga's cave.

 

They entered the woods where the river met the bridge, and Phoebe scrawled through the messages on her old phone for details.

 

“It was near the river,” she said, as Arnold hid the bikes in the underbrush. “She said there was a clean stream and waterfall nearby, so it must be a tributary.”

 

“There's a bunch of little run-offs up here,” Arnold said, pointing to a spot in the east on the topography map. “That's our best bet, but it's a long walk.”

 

“Helga made it in less than forty minutes,” Phoebe said. “But I don't think we'll be as fast, so will we time it to an hour?”

 

“An hour it is.”

 

They followed the river's flow, trudging gently uphill. Arnold was edgy again; Helga had gone quiet, and she was gazing through the trees thoughtfully. Birdsong echoed in the leaves and the river made its music, but apart from the natural sounds of nature it was eerily still and quiet.

 

“They used dogs to search for her out here,” Phoebe said. “Why didn't they find anything?”

 

“It took five days to get the search dogs from the next state over,” Arnold told her. “So the scent would have been faded anyway. Plus someone who knows what they're doing could have sabotaged the trail.”

 

“How do you know that?” Phoebe asked him, frowning.

 

“It was on some of the blog posts I read.”

 

It had been on quite a number of them, and for some bloggers it seemed to point to Bob being the culprit, as he was friends with a number of hunt enthusiasts who would know a lot about scent-disguise. For other bloggers it pointed to stranger abduction, by someone who knew the woods well. One or two thought she might have died of natural causes, gotten lost in the furthest ends of the wood and fallen off a cliff, gotten swallowed by a sinkhole or even eaten by a bear. The fact that the known bear population had their territory over the state lines didn't put a dent in that theory; some bears were known to wander if they were hungry enough.

 

Arnold had read _a lot_ of theories.

 

…..

 

Every grade had a Phoebe, sometimes more than one. A girl who seemed too smart for the rest of her peers, was shy and a bit awkward and spent a lot of time with her head in a book. Not all of them was lucky enough to have a Helga, because the Phoebe in other grades was a prime target for bullies.

 

A little smudge-faced girl named Christie in the third grade was making her way through Dickens. She'd picked up _Great Expectations_ for a book report and loved it so much she decided to read as much of Dickens' work as she could, and since she wasn't burdened with friends she spent her lunch-break doing that instead of socializing. It didn't take long for some of her classmates to take that personally.

 

The bullying was harsh, even by grade school imaginations. They scrawled all over her locker, her books and folders, on her desk, ugly slurs about her face, her body, her parents. They flushed her belongings in the toilet and ripped the tires on her bike. They flipped her skirt in front of groups of boys and, when she started wearing trousers, tried to pop her buttons. They weren't happy until they'd reduced her to a sobbing wreck.

 

Even the fifth graders started hearing about it, and it made them feel awkward and uncomfortable.

 

It just so happened that one of the days that the Christie-torture was reaching a peak, as the head of the pack was ripping the pages out of Christie's third new copy of Nicholas Nickelby and waiting gleefully for the tears to start, that Helga waded into the pack and nonchalantly put her hand in the head's face and pushed him backwards.

 

“What's this happy horseshit?”

 

She was newly eleven, a good head taller than any of them, had a fierce reputation and she'd used a _swear word;_ the pack suddenly became aware of how small they were, and what they had been doing.

 

“Nothing, I....we were just....” one of them stammered.

 

“Just what?” Helga drawled lazily, fixing them all with a contemptuous, half-lidded gaze. “Just making a fucking mess in the hall and getting in my way?”

 

The second swear word just made her, to them, cooler than ever and they wilted.

 

“Sorry,” the pack leader mumbled.

 

They had been a lynch mob, egged on by each other to tear another human being apart, but the spell had been broken, and in its wake was a confused, shameful fog. They didn't feel bad for Christie, and they wouldn't. But they had earned the scorn of someone they automatically looked up to, and for children there was no feeling that was worse.

 

Meanwhile, Phoebe had silently ushered Christie into the bathroom, wiped her face and told her that if she was given any more trouble that she could come to them for help.

 

…..

 

“It's down there, I'm sure of it,” Phoebe said, looking from the incline to her phone and back again.

 

“Are you sure?” Arnold asked, peering down the side of the rock-face.

 

“Yes, I'm sure,” Phoebe answered. “She said she sometimes cut her knees getting down.”

 

“Does this look familiar?” Arnold asked Helga.

 

Helga was pacing along the ledge of the incline, looking over and frowning. She was restless; was that a good sign?

 

“There's....it's like a pull,” she told him.

 

“What did she say?” Phoebe asked.

 

Arnold was getting a little tired of repeating everything Helga said to Phoebe, but he did anyway.

 

“Then that's definitely it. It ticks all the boxes.”

 

They made their way down carefully; the incline wasn't really that steep, but it was bare rock and it jutted out at odd angles. It was almost hidden, tucked away a half-mile from the river under an enormous tree. The cave entrance was hidden behind the tree's overgrown branches. Arnold pushed them away to let Helga and Phoebe enter.

 

“Did you bring a flashlight?” he heard Phoebe ask from the pitch-dark of the cave.

 

“No, I'll use my phone.”

 

He switched the tiny light on his phone on, and the cave was lit up just enough to see what was inside.

 

A sleeping bag and pillow.

 

A pink book-bag.

 

A rucksack.

A camping stove.

 

A set of little girl's pajamas.

 

Comic books and an empty bag of chips.

 

A lump formed in Arnold's throat, and he tried hard to swallow it. Behind him, he could hear Phoebe's muffled sobbing. All laid out like this, the few little things Helga had left behind, it was unbearably sad.

 

A little glimmer of silver by the pillow caught his attention. He knelt down to inspect the object.

 

_Ah. The stick._

 

It was a small USB memory stick.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Nine**

 

After the latest batch of much-appreciated reviews, I realize that there's some questions people had that I didn't intend to answer in-story, though I'm going to flesh out a few more details as I go on. I'm wondering if I should set up a Tumblr for this story and any future fics I intend to write for the fandom, can I get a general consensus? I have Tumblrs for other fics, I find it pretty good for answering queries.

 

Also, I'll be off on a trip for a bit, I hope I might get one more chapter in before I go but there will be a short hiatus (and probably a cliffhanger because I'm just a git.)

 

…..

 

The people you found in true crime communities could almost all be neatly sorted into three categories. It was usually clear within the first few forum posts, first created thread or podcast comment, so that Arnold found himself filing them away as 'ignore' or 'engage' just by looking at their usernames.

 

The most pleasant to deal with were the ones that had a scholarly interest in true crime. They were clever, thorough, usually respectful. A lot of stay-at-home mothers or particularly bright college students, the occasional retired detective. Arnold suspected Officer Plaskett was going by the username _OldDogNewTricks_ on three of the forums he was a member of.

 

The ghouls were mostly easy to spot, they typically weren't too bright. Lots of edgy teenagers that hero-worshiped serial killers and mass shooters, emotional vampires feeding off of grief, deranged romantics that blamed the deceased for having the audacity to die at the hands of the poor, misunderstood murderer. Some of them were very good at faking sincerity until their probing for messy details gave them away.

 

The last category was the one Arnold had put himself in after much deliberation. The people the deceased had left behind, family, friends, loved ones, former teachers and co-workers, people who saw that person all the time until one day they were gone. Full of bewildered hurt, good-natured, sometimes angry, mostly just incredibly sad. There was a sense that the postings they made online were an effort to preserve their loved one in people's memories, in that immortal way of the Black Dahlia or Jonbenet Ramsey or Amber Hagerman.

 

Arnold's first step into the community came with a thinkpiece. He'd been mindlessly surfing the internet, finished with household chores but too mentally drained to start his seventh grade assignments, and it was well past midnight so nobody was awake.

 

_SLIPPING THROUGH THE CRACKS: Does America's school system need to take more responsibility?_

 

The picture at the head of the article was one that would become famous; the one with Helga and Phoebe building a snow fortress, Helga sporting the black eye that would set curious fingers typing all over the internet. The article itself was a mess, barely-there sources, typos and the author went off on an odd tangent about some teacher that had been mean to her back in grade school. But it brought Arnold to the comment section.

 

_The school is definitely to blame, but let's not let CPS off the hook here. They had buckets of evidence even without the school reporting, but they left her there anyway._

 

_Kids get bumps and bruises all the time, how is an underpaid, overworked public servant supposed to tell the difference? Where was this kid's doctor?_

 

_Ugh, just looking at that picture of Papa Pataki gives me chills._

 

He found himself scouring Reddit threads, which lead to blogs, which lead to podcasts and back again, in a circle. He was exhausted, but he kept going until the sun started creeping up the sky. He feigned illness to stay in bed, scrolling through post after post on his phone.

 

A lot of people had opinions on Helga's disappearance. Reading through them was compelling, they filled the vacuum she left behind her at least a little. And for Arnold, whose life was held taut between the boarding house and his schoolwork, it was something other than the everyday drudge to focus on.

 

…..

 

Arnold was buzzing with excitement (could it be called excitement? it was something, anyway) as they left the forest. He escorted Phoebe home, and left her with a promise that he would tell her what was on the memory stick once he saw it.

 

Only after, cycling back to the boarding house with her in the basket, did he realize that Helga had been oddly subdued. She'd been quiet in the woods, and hadn't entered her old hideout with them, and as they approached home she started rubbing her head, just under the wound.

 

“You okay?” he asked. Had something in the woods triggered something for her...?

 

“Yeah, I'm just really tired,” she mumbled back. “My head hurts.”

 

He had shown her the memory stick, but she hadn't shown any recognition or interest in it.

 

“Maybe we took you out too far today,” he mused. “I don't know, maybe the further you are from the house, the weaker you get, or something?”

 

“Maybe,” she agreed with a worn-out sigh.

 

He helped her out of the basket and brought her upstairs, and she was asleep before her head touched the pillow. He tucked her in and left her there to rest before joining his grandparents and the boarders for dinner. The chili was watery and the rice gritty (Gertie's cooking was going downhill rapidly, but no-one could convince her not to let someone else take over) but he swallowed it down fast.

 

_The police never found the stick. She was going to give it to Officer Plaskett. It's evidence, important evidence. Crucial._

 

A tremor passed over Arnold as he slid the USB stick into the port, and his initial excitement paled in the face of dread. If it was evidence, it couldn't be pleasant. He glanced over at Helga, sleeping peacefully under the blankets. He was glad she was asleep.

 

The drive appeared on the screen, containing a folder. No name, just a sequence of random-looking letters and numbers. He opened the folder. It was full of pictures, thumbnails. He scrolled through them, leaning close to the computer screen, squinting. Was he missing something?

 

The first few images were of an empty room. Taken from some high-up corner. The room was mostly bare, just a single bed and a small rug and a few furnishings. Then he spotted the ragdoll, half-hiding under the bed. Helga's room. Without Helga in it.

 

And then, twenty or so images in, Helga appeared. It was unmistakably her, as this was unmistakably her room. But she was wrapped in a towel, another one wound around her head, as the series of images documented second by second. A sickness started to burn in Arnold's stomach, as the much-younger Helga on the screen took the towel down from her head and rubbed her hair dry. When she stood up and undid the towel wrapped around her body, Arnold hit the keyboard hard, flinching away.

 

That was an even bigger mistake. If the first pictures could be explained away as someone's paranoid surveillance, the set he accidentally scrolled down to couldn't be anything but what they appeared to be. He looked at them through his fingers, too sickened to look on them fully but too desperate to find something, _anything,_ to explain away what he was seeing.

 

It was a mercy that Helga was asleep in these pictures. It was an unnatural sleep, clearly drug-induced, because nobody could have been propped up _(displayed)_ the way she was without waking up. It was still her room, her pillow that her head was lolling against, her ragdoll that was lying beside her as a tawny male hand moved her bare limbs around. One hand fisted a handful of blonde hair, holding her up in a way that should have woken even the deepest sleeper, while the other presumably held the camera under her face.

 

There was her blackened eye. There were bruises in the shape of fingerprints on her legs, her torso, her barely-there chest.

 

Arnold managed to close the folder and yank the USB from the drive before he ran to the bathroom to be violently sick.

 

…..

 

_**MarkFisaTwat says:** _

 

_What did you think of her dad? You get any creepy vibes from him?_

 

_**TweenageDirtbag:** _

 

_Not really...he was an asshole to her, but he was kind of an asshole in general. She definitely got the worst of it though._

 

_**MrsKirbyEdmonton:** _

 

_I always thought he was more of an underprotective father than an overprotective one. Those don't really fit the profile for killers of that type. I'm still thinking suicide._

 

_**MarkFisaTwat says:** _

 

_That's kind of blunt._

 

_**MrsKirbyEdmonton:** _

 

_So, what, you think it's not a possibility?_

 

_**MarkFisaTwat says:** _

 

_Well, Dirtbag would know best....what do you think @TweenageDirtbag_

 

_**TweenageDirtbag:** _

 

_Honestly? I don't think she was the type. I mean, I know all kinds of people kill themselves but I can't see her taking that way out. I'd believe she would commit homicide before suicide, iykwim._

 

_**MrsKirbyEdmonton:** _

 

_You never know, though, do you? Nobody really knows what went on in that house, except the people that lived there. There are things that make even the strongest of us want to die._

 

… _.._

 

Arnold shivered in the bathroom for over an hour before he could go back to his room. The images were burned into his brain.

 

_She said she had stomach pains._

 

_She was really tired in the mornings._

 

Stomach pain was a common side effect of certain sedatives, he knew that from managing his grandparents' meds.

 

_She didn't want to go home._

 

Probably because when she slept in her own home she woke up with mysterious bruises and and stomach pains.

 

His phone chimed as he shakily slumped across his bed. He ignored it, and concentrated on the sound of Helga's breathing from across the room. It chimed again.

 

_She found the pictures. She found them and was going to bring them to Officer Plaskett._

 

Back then, on that crime forum, he thought there was no way she could have killed herself and said so. Now, he wasn't so sure. If Arnold had found pictures like that of himself, he could say with certainty that he would want to die. Just seeing them made him desperate to find some way, any way, to block it out.

 

His phone chimed. Again.

 

And again.

 

He picked it up. Phoebe.

 

_Did you look at the USB stick yet?_

 

_Officer Plaskett called my house while we were gone. We can see him at 2pm tomorrow._

 

_Arnold? Hello?_

 

_You said you'd message me. I'm waiting._

 

_If you make me wait til tomorrow about this I'll skin you alive._

 

He almost raised a smile. Phoebe had a fire under her again. Which just made it harder to tell her.

 

_**I looked inside it.** _

 

… _.and?_

 

_**Phoebe, it's really bad. I can't talk about it right now.** _

 

_How bad? She had it when she was alive..._

 

_**I'm serious. I can't tell you. Not while she's here. I can't let her see this.** _

 

_I'm coming over._

 

_**What?** _

 

_**No, don't, it's getting late.** _

 

_I don't care. I want to see._

 

_**No, you don't. Trust me on this.** _

 

_Fuck you, Arnold. This is solid evidence and you're not telling me what it is? Who the fuck do you think you are?_

 

_**Phoebe, please. I wish I hadn't seen it. I'm giving it to Plaskett tomorrow. Let him tell you about it.** _

 

He stared at his phone, willing Phoebe to respond. If he had to open that folder again....

 

_Fine. But if Plaskett won't tell me anything, you have to._

 

_**I will.** _

 

Helga made a soft noise in her sleep, turned a little under her blankets. Arnold glanced over at her. She looked peaceful.

 

Maybe this was why her ghost had no memory. Even after death, she had forcefully blocked it from her mind.

 

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Ten**

 

This will be the last chapter until I come back from my trip. Feel free to vent frustrations at my tendency to leave on cliffhangers in the comments.

 

…..

 

_**One month until:** _

 

_Helga just about made it to the side of the field before she retched into the bunker. Nothing much came up (she'd been too nauseous to eat that morning) but some acidic fluid that burned her throat. She felt slightly better._

 

“ _You okay, Hellbelle?”_

 

_Patrick knew she hated cutesy nicknames, and that's probably why he kept using it. Sure enough, as she looked up at him and scowled he had that Robert-Redford-esque cheeky smile pinned to his classically handsome face. Most girls would probably kill to have him give them a nickname._

 

“ _I'm fine,” she grumbled, wiping her mouth on her sleeve and leaning on her bat. “Stomach's a bit off today.”_

 

“ _You're not getting the stomach flu, are you?” Patrick asked. He still had that 'charming' grin but his eyes looked worried._

 

“ _I don't think so,” she answered. “It's just my stomach. It's like....burning...”_

 

_Now the grin dropped, and she could tell he was half-thinking of calling his mom to get her to the doctor. It wouldn't have been the first time._

 

“ _That's not good,” he mused, rocking on his heels and looking out at the rest of the baseball team. He gestured to the other junior coach to take over and took her by the elbow, lead her into the seats in the bunker._

 

“ _Sit this round out,” Patrick told her. “How long have you had this pain?”_

 

“ _I dunno, couple of days....”_

 

“ _A couple of DAYS?” he asked, eyebrows raised._

 

“ _It wasn't that bad,” she countered, folding her arms sullenly. “Playoffs are coming up.”_

 

“ _You don't need the practice like the rest of them, you know that,” he said, shaking his head in that infuriating-but-oh-so-reasonable way he often did. “Anything else not working right? Or just the stomach pains?”_

 

_He had his phone out and she just knew he was going to message his mom with every little detail. In a way, Helga was relieved. The pains had been worrying her for a while, and Patrick's mom was always so sensible about this kind of thing._

 

“ _I feel really sick in the mornings,” she told him. “And really tired. Kinda dizzy. It passes after a while but...it's making school hard to get through.”_

 

_Patrick's face was solemn now. He was only thirteen, but sometimes he felt like a much older teenager._

 

“ _I'm gonna ask you something, don't freak out,” he sighed, casting his eyes towards the ceiling. “You haven't been....doing stuff with any guys, have you?”_

 

_She knew exactly what he meant, but the urge to mess with him was too strong._

 

“ _What kind of stuff?” she asked, blinking innocently._

 

“ _You know...” he mumbled, visibly uncomfortable and not looking her in the eye. “Underwear stuff?”_

 

_She burst out laughing, and he went red as a tomato._

 

“ _No, I can assure you I haven't been doing 'underwear stuff' with anyone,” she chuckled. “Not that I can remember, anyway.”_

 

“ _I had to ask,” he said, scowling down at her._

 

“ _It's probably just some allergy thing,” she sighed, leaning back against the wall with a hand on her still-churning stomach. “Bob's been doing all the cooking lately so who knows what is going in there. If he could feed us nothing but chipotle and beans he would.”_

 

“ _Sounds like a good excuse to have dinner at my place,” Patrick offered with a carefree shrug. “Stay over tonight, see if you feel better tomorrow.”_

 

“ _Don't you have to ask your mom first?”_

 

“ _As if,” he snorted. “Mom loves you. If she had to choose between us she'd probably pick you.”_

 

_Helga hesitated for just a moment; she did tend to feel less tired and sore when she stayed out of the house, but the cave was getting drafty in the rainy season and Phoebe wasn't as open to sleepovers anymore. And Patrick's mom had a spare bed made up for her._

 

_People would spread even more rumours about them dating, but who cares?_

 

… _.._

 

Arnold didn't want Helga to come with them to see Officer Plaskett.

 

He also didn't want to tell her _why_ he didn't want her to come with them.

 

It was bad enough that Phoebe would be there. She was full of self-loathing for blowing Helga off the night she went missing, this would only make things ten times worse.

 

_And there was that little shred of himself, a little patch of meanness that felt she was right to hate herself, if she hadn't been so selfish Helga wouldn't have gone to the cave and wouldn't have vanished in the first place..._

 

...but he couldn't think that way. Helga didn't, and she had more right to be angry at Phoebe than anyone.

 

“It's half twelve,” Helga informed him, tapping her heel at the door. “Shouldn't we be going now? We're going to be late otherwise....”

 

There was no easy way to say it. It had to be now, whether he liked it or not.

 

“I don't think you should come with us.”

 

Her reaction was predictable; she scowled, crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes at him. It put him in mind of a cobra, for some reason.

 

“Why?” she demanded.

 

“Look, there's stuff I'm going to have to discuss with Officer Plaskett that's pretty harsh,” he began, open-palmed and hopefully reasonable-looking. “He might bring up something you can't remember, and if it's really bad....I'm worried for you. What if you fade out again?”

 

“I'll fade back in here,” she shrugged.

 

“We don't know that,” he countered. “Maybe you can't remember anything for a good reason.”

 

The annoyance on her face faded, replaced by something he couldn't quite figure out...fear? Caution?

 

“This is about the memory stick,” she said, and Arnold's heart sank. “You looked at it.”

 

“Yeah,” he said, looking hard at the ground.

 

“And you think I can't handle it.”

 

“It's not that, I think you could handle just about anything...” he ground out. Some of the images on that stick flickered through his mind, static and hazy. “But I don't want to overload you with this stuff. And I can't talk to you in Plaskett's office, so if you get upset there's nothing I can do about it. I'll tell you myself, when I come back. I swear. If you still want to hear it.”

 

She sighed, moved away from the door and sank onto her blanket nest, refusing to look at Arnold.

 

“Fine,” she huffed. But was that a note of relief he detected in her voice?

 

“I'll be back soon,” he promised.

 

He felt much lighter leaving the boarding house than he had all morning. It was still a grim task he had to complete, but at least he got to leave the biggest problem at home.

 

…..

 

They'd been very excited to have a real police officer come to class, even though just about everyone pretended it was lame. There was some posturing from the class clowns and the wannabe bad boys and some low-level gabbing from the girls about whether or not the officer would be a handsome hero cop.

 

Officer Plaskett was handsome enough, not movie-star worthy but he had an open, friendly face and a few upturned crow's feet to make him look distinguished. He handled the rudeness from the troublemakers with easy wry humour so in the end even the most dedicated delinquent warmed to him.

 

And he seemed very eager to assure them all that the police were there for them if they were in trouble.

 

“The average age for joining a gang is dropping all the time,” he told them. “The best way to keep members in the gang is to get them in young and make them too afraid to leave. You tell them that they'll get in trouble for going to the cops, and they just dig themselves in deeper. Truth is, if you are involved in gang activity and you go to the police, we would take your age into consideration and you wouldn't get in any trouble with the law.”

 

“You'd get in trouble with the gang, though,” Gerald drawled from the back of the classroom.

 

Everyone snickered, but Officer Plaskett kept on smiling.

 

“You'll be in trouble with the gang either way,” he shrugged. “At some point, you'll cross someone you shouldn't have and the consequences will be pretty harsh. Gangs use violence to intimidate the members, they could easily invent a reason to come down hard on you just to keep you in your place.”

 

“Isn't that just human nature?” Helga said suddenly, having sat in somewhat bored silence for the entire lecture. “I mean, that kind of thing is hardly exclusive to gangs.”

 

“You would know, slugger,” one of Suzanne Fischer's resentful 'friends' piped up from the back of the room.

 

“That's pretty astute,” Plaskett answered. “You're right, it's not limited to gangs. This dynamic appears in lots of social groups....school bullies, for example. Or the invading force in times of war. It even pops up in families. The key element is that whoever's in charge makes whoever they're intimidating feel too afraid to ask for help.”

 

A thoughtful silence descended on the class. The officer had used a lot of long words that went over some heads, but they got the idea, more or less. Plaskett stood and grabbed a piece of chalk.

 

“I'm going to give you all a direct line to my office,” he said, scrawling a set of numbers on the blackboard. “If you feel, at any point and for any reason, like you're in danger, you can call me and I will help you.”

 

Everyone took down the number. Everyone.

 

…..

 

Officer Plaskett looked older than Arnold remembered. He had more crow's feet now, and grey hairs peppered across his brow. He ushered them into his cluttered office, paper folders stacked on every available surface, and offered them coffee (they refused).

 

“I have a feeling I know who this is about,” he said, sitting down. He looked tired, and they hadn't even begun.

 

“Maybe,” Arnold said. “We have new evidence.”

 

Phoebe squirmed in her seat, whether eagerness to find out what was on the stick or nervous energy Arnold couldn't tell.

 

“I'd like to see that,” Plaskett said, leaning back lazily in his chair. “We combed every inch of that house, every inch of those woods. We didn't find much. Were you friends of Ms Pataki's?”

 

“I'm her best friend,” Phoebe blurted out.

 

Plaskett's eye twitched a little, no doubt from Phoebe speaking in the present tense.

 

“I spoke to your partner after she went missing,” she continued. “I told him she had a cave in the woods she went to all the time...”

 

“We searched all the caves. Nothing,” Plaskett said.

 

“Yesterday we found it,” Arnold told him. “And I think I know how you missed it. It was a runoff tunnel, I think, from an old river. It was dug into the side of the valley, it doesn't appear on the topography maps. All her stuff is there. We found this.”

 

He handed the stick to Officer Plaskett, who turned it over in his hands curiously.

 

“Have you looked at this?” he asked.

 

“I have. She hasn't,” Arnold answered.

 

Arnold watched the officer's face closely as he put the stick into his hard drive, opened the folders, scrolled down through the pictures. Plaskett was utterly composed, except that as he scrolled further and further the colour drained from his face. Phoebe fidgeted in her seat.

 

“Well,” Plaskett said at last, closing the folder and sliding away from his computer as though it was infected by something. “It's solid evidence. Though it just confirms something we knew already.”

 

“You knew?” Arnold ground out.

 

“We found the cameras,” Plaskett said. “The hard drive was wiped but we found enough evidence for Bob Pataki to get a custodial sentence.”

 

“Cameras?” Phoebe queried, looking from the officer to Arnold and back. “What cameras?”

 

“She was going to see you the day after she went missing,” Arnold said, ignoring Phoebe. “She was going to give you the stick. Someone stopped her.”

 

“We have reason to believe Bob Pataki is not that someone,” Plaskett told him pointedly. “From what we've gathered, Bob's exploitation of his daughter was for financial reasons. His business was doing badly and he needed money. Pictures like the ones on that stick fetch a high price on the dark web.”

 

It was bad enough just thinking of Helga's father abusing her. To know he had sold her out to strangers was even worse.

 

Phoebe, it seemed, had finally caught up with the conversation. Her hand was clasped over her mouth. Arnold could feel her shaking beside him.

 

“I regret not being able to meet with her when she found these pictures,” Plaskett said suddenly. He had been stoic, mostly, up until now. His mask was starting to crumble. “I may have been able to save her. It should never have happened like this. I let her down.”

 

Phoebe was sobbing beside him, but all Arnold could feel was a sense of cold rage.

 

Phoebe had let her down. She needed somewhere safe to escape to and Phoebe refused her.

 

Officer Plaskett had let her down. She had crucial evidence to give to him, and he didn't take it. He wrote his number on their classroom blackboard promising he'd always be there for them, and the first time someone reached out to him he failed to be there.

 

Bob had let her down. He had options to fix his financial issues but the first thing that occurred to him was to throw his daughter to the wolves.

 

Miriam had let her down. She couldn't stay aware long enough to protect her, if she could even be bothered.

 

Teachers, doctors, that therapist she saw for a while, Helga's entire life seemed to be an endless parade of people letting her down.

 

…..

 

Helga pounced on him as soon as he came home. Distantly Arnold wondered if she'd been pacing the floor since he left.

 

“You've been gone for hours,” she said. “It didn't take that long, surely?”

 

He had dropped Phoebe home in a fug of miserable silence, and then walked around town not wanting to go home. He'd gone to the cafe and bought a churro he could barely eat, went to see a movie he couldn't focus on, and then spent two hours just wandering around. When it got dark he finally had to admit to himself he needed to get this over with.

 

“Plaskett entered in the new evidence, but he said it just confirmed something he already knew,” Arnold began. “He knows why you left home in the first place. It just never made the papers.”

 

“Tell me why,” she demanded. “I don't care how bad it is, just spit it out.”

 

“He thinks your father didn't kill you. But he definitely did drug you and took pictures of you when you were unconscious.”

 

“What kind of pictures?” she asked, but Arnold could tell by the look on her face she already knew. She was remembering something.

 

“The kind you sell online to people who like little girls,” he said.

 

She sank down onto her blanket nest, ashen-faced but otherwise taking it all very well.

 

“That's what was on the stick, then?” she asked quietly.

 

“Yes,” Arnold sighed. “I'm so sorry.”

 

“And Bob just got away with it.”

 

“No, he got a custodial sentence,” he told her. “They found hidden cameras in your room. He would have gotten longer if they'd found the pictures but....”

 

“But they never got them. I had them when I disappeared.”

 

“Are you okay?”

 

She looked up at him and smiled, but it was a watery smile, barely there.

 

“I'm not going to fade out, don't worry. Is it weird I'm not even surprised? Bob never wanted me around unless he had a use for me....I suppose I got lucky I went away before he found something else to do with me.”

 

“The new evidence might lead to a breakthrough,” Arnold suggested. “That's what Plaskett said....”

 

“You know, maybe I didn't go missing because anyone took me,” she said. Her voice sounded almost far away, it was so quiet. “Maybe I just decided it wasn't worth living knowing those pictures were out there. Maybe I just walked out into the forest and found some quiet place to die in peace.”

 

Tears pricked the back of Arnold's eyes, but he couldn't afford to be the one crying. Helga deserved as many tears as she could shed, but she didn't look like she had a single tear inside of her. Her face was still as a porcelain mask.

 

She just looked....dead.

 

“I don't think so,” Arnold said. “I think you'd have wanted to live long enough to see Bob pay for what he did. You had enough sense to copy the evidence and phone Plaskett in the first place, I don't think you would have stopped there. Hell, even dying didn't stop you! You came back!”

 

She smiled, faintly.

 

“Maybe,” she whispered, and then drew up her knees under her and lay across the nest. She curled inwards on herself, the way people did when they were badly hurt.

 

Arnold swallowed, crossed the room and threw back the covers on his bed.

 

“Sleep over here,” he demanded. “With me.”

 

“What?” Now she looked startled, and more like herself. “Why?”

 

“I don't think you should be alone right now,” he told her.

 

“We're in the same room,” she half-laughed.

 

“No good,” he said. “You need to be over here with me. I want to be sure you're still here.”

 

She rolled her eyes and got up, crossed the room and slid into his bed. He slid in beside her. It was cramped, the bed wasn't exactly made for two people, but it wasn't uncomfortable. He put his arms around her and pulled her close, tucking her into his body as if he could shield her from the outside.

 

They didn't speak. He felt her tears soaking into his t-shirt but he said nothing and just held her as close as he could. It was the least he could do.

 

 

 

 

 


	11. Chapter 11

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Eleven**

 

 

 **Notes for this chapter:** As I am not from America and Hey Arnold is, a lot of research has gone into the next few chapters when puzzling out locations, but I will probably still get some details wrong. If you notice anything really off, please let me know in the comments.

 

Also, I have not seen the Jungle Movie yet but I'm hearing good things. Lovely.

 

Also also, I now have a Tumblr for this fic: <https://missingverse.tumblr.com/> If you have any questions, comments or anything else feel free to message me there.

 

…..

 

_**Three weeks until:** _

 

_Waking up was a challenge; actually getting up once she was awake was even worse. The sun trickling through the curtains was stinging her eyes and she had slept with her shoulder at an odd angle, it ached._

 

_Once Helga managed to lift her head off the pillow, she noticed that not only had she been drooling again, but the drool was **foamy!** Was that normal? _

 

_Her arms and legs were heavy, she rolled over with difficulty and picked up her cellphone._

 

_**Pheebs, I'm not coming in today.** _

 

_Thank goodness for predictive text, her fingers wouldn't move the way she wanted them to._

 

 

_ **Why not?** _

 

 

 

_**I'm sick.** _

 

 

_ **Again?You really need to see a doctor.** _

 

 

 

_**Yeah, with whose money?** _

_**Free clinic is two bus rides and** _

_**I can barely get out of bed.** _

 

 

 

_ **Ask Patrick's mom to bring you. You know she would.** _

_ **I can ask my mom when she gets home from work.** _

 

 

_**It's fine, I'll try and sleep it off** _

_**and see how it is later. It's probably** _

_**just the flu.** _

 

 

_ **Flu doesn't last this long, Helga.** _

 

 

_**All right, I'll think about it and** _

_**call you later.** _

 

 

_She dropped the phone and attempted to get up. She couldn't remember going to bed the night before; the last thing she remembered was getting halfway through her Social Studies report. She stumbled to the bathroom to wash the drool off her face._

 

_Miriam wasn't up yet; Helga heard her thick snoring from what used to be Olga's room. Bob was definitely gone to work, the sink was clogged with shaving foam and stubble._

 

_She leaned into the mirror and poked at the skin under her right eye. It was still marked from where she'd blackened it. Telling everyone it was a baseball injury was marginally less embarrassing than admitting she'd had a dizzy spell and fallen into a door (like anyone would believe that when it was known as the go-to excuse of beaten wives and battered kids)._

 

_She turned on the shower and made to get undressed, and then she realized just how bad she was; apparently she'd been so out of it she'd put on her nightgown back to front._

 

… _.._

 

Dawn was just tiptoeing up in the sky when Arnold was rather brutally woken up by a knee in his stomach. He opened his eyes to see Helga thrashing in her sleep, trying to push him away from her but just pushing herself closer to the wall. A small distressed whine was rising in her throat.

 

“Helga.... _Helga!”_ he groaned, still half asleep and a touch winded.

 

He shook her by the shoulder gently and she stilled, slowly blinking awake.

 

“You were having a nightmare,” he told her.

 

“Yes, I was,” she replied. She was damp with cold sweat.

 

Being this close, it was remarkable how human she looked for a ghost. He could count individual eyelashes, the faint freckles under her skin, the trembling of her lip that indicated she was still upset but trying to hide it.

 

“You wanna talk about it?” he pressed, scooting to the edge of the bed so she wouldn't feel trapped.

 

“Not really,” she mumbled, turning so she was lying on her back. “But I probably should, right?”

 

“Not if you don't want to.”

 

“There was something around my neck.”

 

Now cold sweat started beading on Arnold's skin under his t-shirt.

 

“What kind of something?” he asked cautiously. “A hand?”

 

“No, not a hand,” she murmured, stroking her throat thoughtfully. “It was cold. And heavy.”

 

That could be anything, but Arnold's mind helpfully supplied some images.

 

_Jewelry._

 

_A thick rope._

 

_A chain._

 

_Something sinkable if you tossed it in water._

 

_Concrete._

 

“It's probably nothing,” Helga demurred, but she didn't sound convincing.

 

Arnold threw back the covers and got to his feet, booted up his computer.

 

“Maybe you should come with us to school today,” he suggested, pulling up the latest headlines. “Just a distraction. Things have been getting really heavy lately...”

 

“Maybe,” she agreed, but she had turned over in the bed, facing the wall. Away from him.

 

They had hit a dead end. They had where Helga had gone last and why she was there, but Officer Plaskett was certain Bob Pataki hadn't been involved in her disappearance.

 

 _He wouldn't have wanted to lose his only source of real income_ Arnold thought sourly.

 

But that left them with nothing else. Nowhere to go. Part of him was a little glad though, because it was just now occurring to him that if they discovered what happened to her, ghost Helga would have no reason to stay and he had grown very used to having her around.

 

“Wanna hear some news?” he asked.

 

“Sure, why not?” she replied, still facing the wall and a little muffled by the pillow.

 

“Lena Montclare has been slammed for inflammatory tweets about her fans,” he began.

 

“What kind of news is that?” she said, turning over to look at him. “Who's Lena Montclare?”

 

“Remember that Netflix movie you watched while I was out? She played the sister.”

 

“Oh. She was awful in that.”

 

“She's just awful in general.”

 

“What else is there?”

 

“Seven reasons _JimBob Saves Christmas_ doesn't need a reboot....Massive shipment of Lego bricks runs aground on Kettle Beach.... Golden couple Ray Harkness and Mona Washington rocked by rumours of infidelity...Pocaselas cheer team make the nationals....”

 

Helga sat up suddenly.

 

“What was that last one?” she asked, a high note rising in her voice.

 

“What? Pocaselas cheer team....” he answered.

 

“Pocaselas. What is that?”

 

“Uh, it's a city two states over, I think.”

 

Pocaselas was barely a city, more like a halfway point for people on their way to somewhere better. It was full of motels, hotels and trans-state bus lines. Arnold had been stranded there once for seven hours when trying to get to Montana for a concert when he was thirteen. He hadn't even tried to go to a concert since.

 

“I know that place. I keep seeing the name,” she said, rubbing at her temple _(just under her scar)._

 

“Seeing it? Where?” Arnold asked, typing the word into Google.

 

“In my dreams. It's printed on something.”

 

“Like a newspaper or a street sign?”

 

“I don't know, it's hazy.”

 

Pocaselas was unremarkable; Google brought up basic info about annual rain fall, bus timetables, some mommy blogger's website....

 

 

….until about three entries down in the search and the only real reason anyone knew that Pocaselas even existed.

 

_The Black Gulch Ripper._

 

… _.._

 

In the early nineties, Pocaselas became known as a hive for young runaways and working prostitutes, who were sometimes one and the same. For any young person looking to disappear, it was a good option. There were lots of short-term places to stay, lots of abandoned buildings to squat in when the money ran out, and plenty of truckers and blow-ins to keep the working girls in business.

 

When women began going missing, nobody thought much of it. People left Pocaselas all the time, especially runaways. There were a lot of cases where a john was robbed by a working girl who fled town on the first bus in any direction. So nobody could really pinpoint who the first victim was.

 

The first victim found, however, was 26-year-old Elisa Frank. She appeared in the Black Gulch on the edge of the city, discovered by a local fisherman, and was so bloated and disfigured it was near impossible to see what had been done to her. Her throat had been cut, and a good number of internal organs were missing.

 

A girl who had frequently worked the same stretch of highway as Elisa turned up next, not in the Gulch itself but just beside it. Sarah May Caldwell's throat had also been cut but only her heart and lungs were missing. Police arrested the girl's pimp for their murder but he was released without charge (and then picked up again and sent down for three years for soliciting.)

 

As many as a hundred girls had been reported missing; with the ones that hadn't been reported the number would have been closer to three hundred. Three more bodies were found in the Gulch in the same state as Elisa and Sarah May, but it was near impossible to tell who could be considered the culprit's next victim just looking at the missing reports.

 

By the time four more bodies appeared in the gulch, a pattern had emerged. They were all young women; the oldest was thirty-four and the youngest nineteen. They were blondes, mostly (Tegan Nicholls was biracial with curly dark hair and Annette Fischer was a redhead) and they were between five foot and five seven. Several of them were heroin addicts and three on some other narcotic, which the police theorized made them easier to capture, and most were prostitutes but two were mere runaways.

 

The newspapers gave the killer the nickname everyone used. He would go quiet for two to three year stretches and then come back with a new body, and there was a grim sense that the press had been waiting for him because it was the only kind of interesting news you got in a place like Pocaselas.

 

There had been theories that the Black Gulch Ripper was behind Helga Pataki's disappearance, but it was dismissed as nonsense. For one, Helga was much younger than the killer's usual M.O. He also concentrated his attacks in the Pocaselas general area, and the difference between that city and Hillwood was two states and a mess of highways and sideroads. The roads in and out of Hillwood had speed cameras that had picked up nothing beyond the usual traffic.

 

It was entirely possible to reach Pocaselas on foot through the forest that ran from Hillwood through the interim state to the edge of the city, but that was only if you managed to avoid swamps full of water moccasins, treacherous sinkholes and the occasional bear. It was said only a madman would attempt it.

 

…..

 

“You're not ready yet?” Phoebe said as he opened the bedroom door to her, still in his pyjamas.

 

“We might have got something,” he told her, ushering her in. “I'll tell you on the way to school, I just need to shower.”

 

Her attention wasn't on him though; she was looking in the general direction of Helga, sitting on his bed.

 

“I can kind of see her,” she said, a smile slowly growing. “The air is kind of blurry, like when there's gas in the air.”

 

“That's good,” he said.

 

“I have a new notebook for you,” Phoebe said, ignoring Arnold entirely. “I missed your last few birthdays, I owed you a new one.”

 

“Wow, thanks Pheebs,” Helga said, taking the notebook.

 

“Did you hear anything? She thanked you,” Arnold told her, and Phoebe's face fell.

 

“No,” she mumbled. “But it's okay, she can write to me with the notebook.”

 

Arnold left them there, and throughout his shower he could hear the low murmur of Phoebe talking and Helga answering, although he knew anyone else listening would just hear the sounds of a girl talking to herself. He got out, dressed and just as he was about to come back in, he heard something that made him linger outside.

 

“....has to know _something_ , doesn't he? I mean, you ended up in his house...”

 

Helga muttered a reply he couldn't hear and through the crack in the door he saw her scribble out a response and hand over the notebook. Phoebe read it and rolled her eyes.

 

“If not now, then when?” she said. “Back then you told me you were over it, but you're obviously not.”

 

Helga scribbled out another response, and at this one Phoebe looked like she wanted to cry.

 

“What's the point?” she half-laughed. “You tell me! Maybe the reason you're back is nothing to do with how you died, you know? Maybe that's not the right kind of closure....”

 

They both lapsed into silence, and Arnold felt it was okay to come back inside. He watched Helga slam the new notebook shut when he came back in.

 

“You ready to go?” he asked.

 

…..

 

Helga ultimately decided not to join them, and for the first few minutes of the walk to school Phoebe was silent. Until....

 

“...why is she in your bed?”

 

“What?” Arnold sputtered.

 

“She's in your bed now,” Phoebe continued. “She was on the sofa and now she's not. Why?”

 

“I had to tell her about the memory stick,” Arnold said with a sigh. “She was pretty upset, and I was worried.”

 

“So she ended up in your bed because she was _upset?”_

 

“I can understand why you're worried, but nothing happened. At least until this morning.”

 

Phoebe stopped dead in the street and grabbed his arm, turned him around.

 

“What happened this morning?” she demanded, cheeks turning pink with anger.

 

“She had a nightmare,” Arnold explained.

 

The colour drained from Phoebe's face, and she looked abashed.

 

“Sorry,” she muttered. “I guess I'm still a bit peeved that you can see her and I can't, but I shouldn't take that out on you. How does she look to you?”

 

“Like herself, but older,” Arnold shrugged. “Speaking of....do you remember any kind of scars Helga had before she went missing?”

 

“Scars?” Phoebe questioned, thoughtful. “Um...she had one on her elbow from where she broke her arm and the bone went through skin. And she kept saying she had one under her eye from when she blackened it but I think she was just hyper-focused on it...”

 

“Wasn't that the one her Dad gave her?”

 

“That was just a rumour, Arnold,” Phoebe sighed. “She ran into a door because she was dizzy and she didn't want to tell anyone because someone would spread rumours. Which they did anyway.”

 

“Oh,” was all Arnold could think to say. He'd bought into that rumour, they all had.

 

“Why are you asking? Does she have different ones?”

 

“Yeah,” Arnold said, and took a deep breath before continuing. “She has a big one, on her head. Looks like she was hit with something big and heavy. There's one on the back of her leg too.”

 

Phoebe blanched even more.

 

“And there's one more, a really long one...it goes from her hip to her chest. It looks kind of deep too.”

 

“Her hip to her chest? How do you know about that one?” Phoebe asked.

 

“Come on, Phoebe...” Arnold groaned.

 

“How do you know about _that_ one?” Phoebe growled.

 

“I looked, okay? She was asleep and I saw the edge of it from under her t-shirt so I took a look.”

 

“You goddamn perv-”

 

“There was nothing sexy about it if that's what you're worried about,” Arnold muttered. “I don;t know about you but looking at knife wounds doesn't get me hot under the collar.”

 

Once again, Phoebe's anger faded.

 

“Sorry,” she mumbled again. “She used to complain when boys paid attention to her... I guess I'm still a bit protective.”

 

“It's okay,” Arnold shrugged. “It's nice, actually. Nice to see you trying to look after her even after all of this.”

 

“Just repaying the debt. I would have been eaten alive at school if it wasn't for Helga.”

 

Phoebe had forgotten to ask what the new thing they had discovered was, and by the time they reached the school he had debated with himself over and over about telling her.

 

 _The Black Gulch Ripper_ flashed in his mind, over and over.

 

In the end, he decided it could wait.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	12. Chapter 12

 

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Twelve**

 

_**A week until:** _

 

_She'd been up at the cave for three days and whatever mystery illness she had was clearly getting killed off by the fresh air and clear springwater up there (she figured, anyway) but she had to go home eventually._

 

_After school, she tossed her clothes and sleeping bag in the washing machine, made a mental note to pick up some paraffin for the camping stove and batteries for her flashlight and showered. Just as she was getting out of the bathroom she caught the scent of cooking wafting from the kitchen. It didn't smell all that appetizing (way too much garlic and five-spice) but after three days of char-grilling over a campfire something cooked on an actual hob would be nice._

 

“ _Hi honey, how was your day,” Miriam drawled, already halfway into a Long Island iced tea._

 

“ _Pretty good,” Helga drawled back, sitting across from her. “Got an A on my History report.”_

 

“ _That's nice,” Miriam sniffed, and swigged from her glass._

 

“ _Hit three home runs in practice yesterday.”_

 

“ _That's super,” Miriam slurred, stirring her ice cubes with a straw._

 

“ _Then I beat a homeless man to death with my baseball bat. He had it coming.”_

 

“ _That's nice,” she said again._

 

“ _Went to the park to celebrate and ended up doing a whole bunch of meth with some crackheads.”_

 

“ _Well, the important thing is that you tried, dear,” Miriam slurred, blinking heavily._

 

_Helga rolled her eyes; the 'say outrageous shit and see how long it takes Miriam to notice' game used to be fun when she was younger, but it was getting dull. Miriam just didn't react to anything anymore._

 

_Bob blustered in just then with a pot full of some mysterious bubbling 'stuff.' Probably chili again. He looked surprised to see Helga there._

 

“ _Where the hell have you been?” he growled._

 

“ _Overnight field trip,” Helga shrugged. “I gave you the permission slip, remember?”_

 

_She gave him nothing of the sort but Bob nodded anyway._

 

“ _Uh, yeah,” he muttered. “Hang on, I'll get you a plate.”_

 

_He took the pot back with him for whatever reason, and there was a big production of opening and slamming cupboard doors. When he came back, he dumped two plates of 'stuff' in front of Helga and Miriam. Helga poked at what might have been a pinto bean with her fork gingerly._

 

“ _What's in this?” she asked as Bob sat down with his own plate._

 

“ _Little bit of everything,” he said, but he wouldn't look at her; he just shoveled the stuff into his own mouth. “Eat it and stop whining. I didn't spend all day in that kitchen to have you turn up your nose at it.”_

 

_She rolled her eyes again, but took a dainty bite of the mystery stuff. It was gritty, and oddly chalky and the aftertaste reminded her of accidentally inhaling aerosol spray._

 

… _.._

 

Phoebe caught up with Arnold at lunch, just as he was telling Thom from Social Studies about some cliff notes he had found.

 

“You were going to tell me something this morning,” she said instead of hello.

 

Arnold was acutely aware that people were looking at them and whispering. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Gerald frowning. He gathered up his lunch tray, excused himself to Thom and brought Phoebe over to one of the empty tables at the back of the cafeteria.

 

“Yes, I was,” he said. “Something I came across this morning, it triggered a memory for Helga.”

 

“What was it?”

 

Arnold glanced around him; if Phoebe got upset, the rumours would be pretty wild....

 

“Arnold, stop it.”

 

“Hm? Stop what?”

 

She threw down her sandwich and fixed him with a hard glare.

 

“Stop keeping things from me because you think I'll be upset,” she said. “I've been upset for five years. I know it's going to be bad but I can deal with it. I want to help Helga just as much as you do.”

 

“Okay,” he sighed. “What do you know about Pocaselas?”

 

“Not much,” she said, brows furrowed in concentration. “I got a bus from there once when my Dad's car broke down.”

 

“Helga sees the name of the place in her dreams,” he told her. “I think it's like a residual memory. She also said she feels like there's something around her neck when she's asleep.”

 

Phoebe paled, but braced herself.

 

“Pocaselas is known for being a place that runaways go to a lot,” Arnold continued. “Do you think she might have gone there?”

 

“No,” Phoebe answered abruptly. “She always said she was determined to wait it out. She would have qualified for boarding school scholarships in another year, she was talking to Mr Simmons about it.”

 

Arnold hadn't thought about Mr Simmons for a long time. In the aftermath of Helga's disappearance he'd taken early retirement and left Hillwood. A paper reporting on the case quoted him as 'heartbroken.'

 

“She wouldn't have gone voluntarily,” Phoebe said, shaking her head with certainty.

 

Arnold swallowed. “Then that leaves us with the other solution. Have you heard of the Black Gulch Ripper?”

 

Phoebe paled even more, which should have been impossible.

 

“Yes,” she murmured. “Bits and pieces.”

 

“Most theories say he's an experienced woodsman,” Arnold said, bringing up the slew of articles he had looked up on his phone between classes. “Pocaselas is bordered by a stretch of woodland and marsh that meets Hillwood's forests on the other side. There's no roads connecting them and it's about two days walk if you don't mind wading through sinkholes in bear-infested wildland.”

 

“All the Rippers' victims were adults,” Phoebe countered.

 

“They were young women, or at least looked it,” Arnold said. “The youngest was nineteen, and all of them were taken from Pocaselas. Then he went quiet about three years before Helga went missing. It's not unknown for murderers to keep picking younger and younger victims.”

 

“So you think he caught her in the forest when she was out there? He walked for two days through bear-infested wildland, as you put it, and just happened to come across her? That's kind of far-fetched...”

 

“Is it really? Because none of the buses leaving Hillwood, none of the cars going through the speed cameras picked up anyone fitting Helga's description. As far as we can see, she never left the forest.”

 

“All his victims were dumped in the Gulch,” Phoebe said. “They never found Helga's body.”

 

“All of his known victims,” Arnold countered. “People disappear from Pocaselas at four times the national average. An experienced woodsman would be better suited to dragging someone through the marshes.”

 

Mute and unhappy, Phoebe stared down at her nibbled-on sandwich and Arnold did the same to his own mostly untouched lunch. They were almost relieved when the bell rang and they went back to class.

 

And then, something very unexpected happened.

 

Just as Arnold was pulling out his Algebra homework, Rhonda Lloyd Wellington stopped in front of his desk. Tapping her foot irritably and frowning down at him, she was oddly twitchy.

 

“I need to talk to you about something,” she said, glancing around the room at anyone who was looking in their direction.

 

“Uh, sure?” he said, surprised. She hadn't spoken a word to him in over a year.

 

“Not here,” she said furtively. “Meet me in the coffee house after school. If you're even a minute past four, I'm leaving.”

 

And then she was gone.

 

…..

 

The girls were furious, because Helga Pataki was flaunting her older boyfriend in front of the school with absolutely no shame.

 

Well, flaunting wasn't the word Arnold would have used. Helga was talking quietly to the boy at the wall that separated the school grounds from the street, and he was gently teasing her about something because she laughed and jokingly punched his arm. He flashed his teen-idol-worthy smile at her, the kind that seemed designed to make preteen girls swoon, and she rolled her eyes because she was all too used to it.

 

To the other girls, they might as well have been making out in full view of the entire school.

 

“He treats her like one of the boys,” Angela Harper sniffed with an injured air. “If that's the kind of thing he goes for, good luck to them.”

 

“Wasn't there another boy walking her home yesterday?” Nadine piped up.

 

“That's Martin,” Phoebe said over the spine of her book. “Patrick was away yesterday and they don't like letting Helga walk home in the dark. She's not dating either of them.”

 

“Whatever,” Angela said, tossing her hair back. “Personally I don't think a boy should walk you home unless you're dating but that's just...”

 

“Could you all just shut the fuck up?” Rhonda growled suddenly, looking up from her phone for the first time.

 

A touchy silence fell on the girls, they exchanged nervous glances. Rhonda smoothed down her hair, and over her shoulder Arnold could see she wasn't looking at her phone but rather at her own reflection in the blackened shine of the screen.

 

…..

 

Rhonda glared when she saw Arnold had brought Phoebe with him.

 

“You could have warned me you were bringing her.”

 

“Sorry,” Arnold shrugged. “I get the feeling this is about Helga. You were behind us in the cafeteria.”

 

“Bingo, Sherlock,” Rhonda laughed scornfully, and then she looked nervous again. “Hey, you mind getting me a latte or something? They don't let me vape in here, can you believe that?”

 

“Okay,” Arnold nodded, and went to the counter to order. Phoebe followed him.

 

“Can you believe her?” Phoebe hissed into his ear. “As if she's doing you a favour being here...!”

 

“She might be, we don't know yet,” Arnold hissed back. “If she gives us something new, it's worth the price of a latte, right?”

 

Phoebe grudgingly agreed.

 

Even when she had her coffee in front of her, Rhonda fidgeted, took out her vape and put it away again, touched up her mascara and fiddled with her phone before she even tried to speak to them. Her hands were trembling, Arnold noted with surprise.

 

“Did you want to tell us anything or are we just here to watch you be Rhonda?” Phoebe bit out at last.

 

“Ooh, that's told me,” Rhonda laughed mockingly. “Fine, let's get this over with.”

 

But as she took a sip of her latte, her demeanor changed once again, her eyes dropped to the table in front of her.

 

“Look, you have to understand something first, okay?” she began. “I was a stupid kid. A really fucking stupid kid. I did stupid shit and nobody ever stopped me so I just kept on doing it. Get that?”

 

Arnold nodded, Phoebe folded her arms and stared. Rhonda sipped her latte again.

 

“Back then, I was really pissed off at Helga,” she continued. “I didn't even think she liked boys... and she didn't give a shit about looking nice or anything so it was kind of annoying when suddenly all these older boys are fawning all over her like she's some fucking supermodel....

 

“She wasn't dating them,” Phoebe cut in. “You _know_ she wasn't!”

 

“Whatever,” Rhonda quipped. “Anyway, it made me mad, okay? And I thought fine, if she can do it so can I. How hard would it really be to get myself an older boyfriend? Turns out it's not that hard at all. Especially if you do it online.”

 

Arnold's heart sank; he had a feeling he knew where this was going.

 

“You'd better believe I got lots of attention. As many older boys as I could ever want. Way older. And then there's this one guy who pops up, and he's really nice to me. Listens to all my complaints about school and home and whatever, and then he sends me a picture.”

 

“What kind of picture?” Arnold asked, his mouth gone dry with the horror of it.

 

“A picture of Helga. Not a creepy picture or anything, except she's asleep in it. And he tells me she's his cousin and asks if I know her. I didn't even know she had a cousin.”

 

“She doesn't,” Phoebe said quietly, as if from very far away.

 

“I didn't know that. So I said yeah, she's in my class. He tells me he wants to meet up with his family because they got separated or some shit, and I figure if he meets up with them he would be in Hillwood and I could date him properly. Like I said, I was a stupid fucking kid.”

 

“what did you do, Rhonda?” Arnold gulped.

 

“I told him where we lived.”

 

Phoebe reacted before Arnold could stop her. There was a loud crack as her palm met Rhonda's cheek. Rhonda's head snapped to the side and she stayed there, stunned, as her face reddened.

 

“You bitch,” Phoebe growled. “You sold her out because you wanted a _boyfriend?_ You fucking bitch!”

 

She went to slap her again, but Arnold stood up and grabbed her arms, pulling her back, as Rhonda shakily sat up again cradling her cheek in her hand.

 

“Phoebe, no,” he hissed, trying to drag her back down to her seat. “Come on, what's done is done.”

 

Phoebe swung back and pushed him away, and then she grabbed her bag and stormed out. As the door of the coffee shop slammed shut, he could see she was in tears. He could go after her, but....

 

“Rhonda, are you okay?” he asked quietly.

 

Tears were glittering in her eyes, but she blinked them away and tried to act casual, sipping her latte like nothing had happened.

 

“You're a nice guy, you know that?” she laughed bitterly. “It's no less than I deserved, right? As if I haven't been thinking about it ever since...”

 

“Did you tell the police when they questioned you?” he asked, already guessing she hadn't.

 

“No,” she said, and Arnold's heart sank. “Arnold, I sent pictures to some of those guys! Pictures I didn't want my folks seeing....and you know how that kind of thing gets around....I'd have been finished at school.”

 

“Helga's probably dead, Rhonda,” Arnold reminded her. “And whoever got her is still out there. I think it's a bit more important than your reputation.”

 

“Yeah, well,” she laughed again, so bitter it stung. “Like I said, I was a stupid fucking kid.”

 

…..

 

Helga was asleep in his bed when he got back, and Arnold's heart thumped hard because she had been sleeping more and more lately. Did it mean something? Were they running out of time to find her closure?

 

The PC was on, and a folder of his finished homework was open on the screen. It was only 8pm, but he dressed for bed and slid in beside her anyway, to watch her breathe. His eyes traced the long line of her throat, looking for the mark of whatever she felt was around her neck. Sure enough, there was a faint red line circling her neck, near the juncture of her chest. He reached out and stroked it gently with his finger.

 

Suddenly, Helga mumbled something frenzied-sounding in her sleep, turned over and ended up just an inch or two from Arnold's face. He saw something he hadn't noticed before.

 

On her bottom jaw, on the right side, two teeth were missing.

 

 

 

 

 

 


	13. Chapter 13

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Thirteen**

 

Thank you all once again for the reviews I've gotten. I am a very busy person at the best of times, and this time of year is especially hectic, but every review I get reminds me that someone is waiting for another piece of the puzzle and it is very powerful motivation. Thank you for reading thus far and thank you again for sharing your thoughts with me.

 

…..

 

_**Three days until:** _

 

_The rainy season had well and truly hit, and Helga's stomach ached as she trudged down the road, pushing her bike beside her. She was muttering darkly to herself, as if that would do any good. The mystery illness was having a relapse since she'd been home and the baseball diamond was rained out so she couldn't go burn off some anger there all week._

 

_And then, because misery comes in threes, her front tire was flat._

 

_She had about fifteen minutes to get to school before the bell rang, and it was still a half hour walk. She'd probably get detention, and that meant navigating around the hills in the dark once she was finished. That's if she didn't stop for food somewhere first._

 

“ _Need some help there, sweetheart?”_

 

_The voice made her jump, just a little, because as pleasant as it was she hadn't heard a car come up behind her. It was a quiet back road, there wasn't anyone else around. Where did this guy come from?_

 

“ _Let me guess, your tire's flat and you're late for school?”_

 

_Cautiously, she nodded and moved closer to the road bank, near the trees. The stranger was keeping the car at an easy glide, matching her pace. He was an ordinary-looking guy; if you'd asked her to pick him out of a line-up, she probably couldn't. His accent wasn't Hillwood, not even rural Hillwood. His presence dug into some uneasy space inside of her but she didn't quite know why._

 

“ _Why don't you hop in, I'll take you there...”_

 

_He smiled when she shook her head, but it didn't reach his eyes._

 

“ _My friend's mom is coming this way to pick me up, I'm just going to meet her,” Helga explained, gesturing with her cellphone. “Thanks anyway.”_

 

_It was a lie and he knew it, she could tell._

 

“ _Smart girl,” he laughed. “You know better....well, how's about I fix that tire instead?”_

 

_Before she could refuse, he'd stopped his car and taken out a pump and some rubber solvent. He patched up her tire, and as he worked she surreptitiously dialed 911 on her phone, just in case._

 

“ _There you go, good as new,” he said after a moment or two. Then he was back in his car and driving away just as suddenly as he'd arrived._

 

“ _You take care now,” he called from his window as he left._

 

… _.._

 

“...did Helga ever lose any teeth?”

 

Phoebe abruptly stopped eating and fixed Arnold with a baffled look.

 

“You mean permanent teeth?” she asked. “No, I don't think so...”

 

He said nothing, just went back to miserably stirring his uneaten pudding. The gap in Helga's mouth had been tiptoeing around in his brain ever since he saw it.

 

“Why, is she missing some now?” Phoebe asked, quietly, leaning over the lunchtable to him. They'd been overheard once, by Rhonda, and they didn't want to risk it again.

 

“Sort of,” Arnold said.

 

“Arnold,” Phoebe growled low. “We went through this already...”

 

“Well, I don't know? Who's to say she didn't lose them before she went missing?”

 

“How many?” Phoebe asked, frowning. “And where?”

 

“Two, I think. On the bottom row.”

 

“Then no, I would have noticed,” Phoebe answered.. “She was careful about her teeth, you know? Her dad wouldn't put her on the dental insurance so she only ever saw a dentist once, when my mom brought her in for a filling. She played baseball with a mouthguard in.”

 

They lapsed into another unhappy silence. The cafeteria was unusually quiet that day too, so the silences lingered on for what felt like hours.

 

“I've been thinking,” Phoebe began again after a while. “Black Gulch Ripper or not, the person who took her would have to be someone who got her picture from the internet. Is there any way we can get a list?”

 

“Why do you figure that? There's just as much chance it was an opportunist....”

 

“No, there's not. Whoever it was got hold of one of her pictures and asked Rhonda about her. He picked her because he knew Bob wouldn't call the police until he'd gotten rid of the evidence, which would give him a head start on getting her out of Hillwood.”

 

“Bob didn't call the police,” Arnold said. “You did.”

 

“Not until two days later,” she told him. “At that point I just figured her cellphone was off, I was worried but not _that_ worried. Maybe he thought Bob would never call the police because he couldn't without getting himself in trouble.”

 

“The Black Gulch Ripper's victims were all runaways and prostitutes,” Arnold wondered out loud. “People who wouldn't be missed right away.”

 

“Exactly,” Phoebe said, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “He targeted her, for whatever reason. And he had to get her picture from somewhere.”

 

For a moment, Arnold was hopeful. It felt like a breakthrough, but it was gone again a moment later.

 

“No,” he sighed. “From what I've heard, those kind of pictures get traded around a lot. Like, one person buys them and then passes them on to his contacts, and then they do the same...it makes them almost impossible to fully trace.”

 

Phoebe dropped her apple on her tray and folded her arms, dismay etched all across her face.

 

“If we want to get on the right track, we need to focus on Pocaselas,” Arnold offered.

 

Phoebe snorted and rolled her eyes, a gesture that reminded Arnold of Helga and caused a little stabbing sensation in his heart.

 

“The Ripper's been giving the police the slip for nearly two decades, Arnold. What makes you think we can do any better where they failed?”

 

“We have Helga,” he answered. “They didn't.”

 

…..

 

_He knew it was a dream, straight away. It had that stillness to it, that sluggish air and the colours were tinted as if by a photo filter._

 

_Knowing it was a dream didn't help._

 

_She was standing in the middle of the road, cars rocketing past her, clutching her skirt with her hands and nervously looking around. She was younger than she was when she vanished, about five or six years old._

 

_Why weren't the cars stopping? Why weren't any of the people on either side of the road trying to get to her? They didn't seem to see her at all._

 

_He tried to reach her, but for all his steps towards her he didn't get any closer. He tried to call for her, but he was mute. If he didn't reach her, she would be hit by a car; he knew that much._

 

_And then just as he was getting frantic, she looked up at him._

 

_She tried to speak, but a torrent of blood came rushing out of her mouth instead._

 

_And just as she took a step towards him, one of the cars finally got her._

 

… _.._

 

Arnold woke with a full-body spasm, his muscles seized, his hands still outstretched to try and pull Helga away from the road. As he blinked and focused, gulping in shaky breaths, he could feel the fabric of his own t-shirt on Helga's body clutched in his fists.

 

“...Arnold?” Helga's voice spoke quizzically into the dark. Just hearing it put him at considerably more ease.

 

“Bad dream, nothing to worry about,” he mumbled.

 

“Are you sure?”

 

He drew in one deep breath, held it, and sighed it out.

 

“Yeah, I'm fine,” he said. “Sorry I woke you.”

 

“That's okay. I've been sleeping too much lately anyway.”

 

She was warm beside him. He remembered when she first appeared to him that she had been cold to the touch, barely there. Now she was practically alive again.

 

He was already covered with a thin film of cold sweat, and now a new dread occurred to him.

 

_What's going to happen to her if we find her killer?_

 

She would vanish. The only reason she was back at all was to find some closure, or so they thought anyway, and once she had it there would be no reason for her to stay.

 

Eleven-year-old Helga, distant as she was, left a hole in Arnold's life when she disappeared. This Helga, this warm, solid phantom who lived in his house and did his homework and wore his clothes to bed every night would tear a much bigger hole, one he wasn't sure he could recover from.

 

For the first time, he questioned whether he really wanted to find her killer.

 

“Hey, I had a thought...” he began.

 

“Wow, one whole thought. Congrats.”

 

_Her snippy wit will be gone forever._

 

“Very funny,” he half-laughed. “Things have been kind of heavy lately, I think we need a break. How would you like to go to the movies this Saturday? They have a run on those old horror movies you like.”

 

“Sounds good to me,” she agreed, sounding half-asleep again already. “And you don't have to buy me a ticket, win-win.”

 

“Yeah, you make a cheap date,” he laughed.

 

He could feel himself blushing at the idea that he had called it a _date,_ and then he was sad again because it wasn't a proper date and she would never have one.

 

“I'll have to finish your English paper first,” she said, punctuated by a yawn. “Tell Mr whatever to stop giving you the crappy plays.”

 

“Did you go off-topic again?” he said, trying to sound stern but failing because he was smiling too hard.

 

“Yep,” she answered, and then she was asleep again.

 

…..

 

Friday was boring, a long stretch of nothing. Arnold was tempted to pass on Helga's disdain for the plays Mr Coveny was assigning them, just to liven up the day. He and Phoebe ate lunch together, but didn't say much. He was tempted to invite her along on their cinema date, but decided against it. He'd just end up relaying messages between the two of them.

 

The only oddness throughout the day was that his phone kept ringing from numbers he didn't recognize, and when he did answer between classes nobody was there, just the background echo of traffic and people on the street. He passed it off as a crank caller.

 

But on his way home, he spotted the police car's flashing lights before the boarding house even fell into his line of vision.

 

_Grandpa._

 

Another stroke, or a heart attack. They had been waiting for this. It didn't stop Arnold's heart thumping painfully.

 

But Phil was on the stoop, talking to the officers, hands waving around and clearly distressed. He looked worried, but that was a damn sight better than dead.

 

“Grandpa?” he said, tossing his bike to the side. “What's going on?”

 

“Oh Arnold, thank God,” Phil gasped. “Your Grandma's gone AWOL. The police are putting out an alert...”

 

“Son, did you notice anything off about your grandmother's behavior today?” an officer cut it.

 

_No more than usual._

 

In a way, it was a miracle this had never happened before. Arnold stole a worried glance at Phil. He was pale, wheezing.

 

_If anything happens to Grandma..._

 

“Grandma gets mixed up sometimes,” he told the officer. “But she's never wandered off before...”

 

“She left her coat behind,” Phil said quietly, almost to himself. “And her shoes.”

 

“Is she taking any medication we should know about?” the officer asked.

 

“Yeah, hang on, I'll get you a full list....” Arnold answered.

 

Rummaging around in the important documents box for Grandma's prescriptions, he felt eerily calm. Grandma was a tough old girl, and the weather wasn't that cold, and she only wore shoes when it suited her anyway...

 

_She's nearly eighty-five. It's getting dark._

 

Or maybe Arnold was just so used to disaster that he was finally numb to it.

 

Just as he was staring helplessly down at a handful of medical receipts, his phone rang again. Another unrecognizable number. He answered it anyway.

 

There was a tapping noise, and very faintly he could hear someone muttering, along with distant traffic sounds. But the muttering sounded familiar, he strained to hear it.

 

“...Grandma? Grandma!”

 

She wasn't at the phone, but just beside it. He could hear her, but she couldn't hear him. And then suddenly, there was a sound of breaking glass and a shop alarm going off. He could hear his Grandma fretting, and the tapping on the receiver again.

 

Oh.

 

Someone had been trying to message him. All day.

 

…..

 

They found Gertie almost five miles out of town, standing beside a furniture store with a broken window. She was cold and she had cuts on her feet, but she was otherwise fine.

 

The payphone the call had been made to was nearby, but checking CCTV footage from nearby showed that Gertie had neither made the phone call or broken the window. The officers were baffled, but they were just glad to have the old lady safe and with her family. They drove Arnold and his grandparents to the hospital where Gertie was checked in to wait for a consultation the next day. Phil sent Arnold home.

 

He took the bus, gripping the seat in front of him hard enough to tear the fabric. That had been a very close call.

 

Once he was home, he went straight upstairs.

 

“I'm so sorry, I couldn't get the phone to work and I didn't know what to do....” Helga began.

 

She was cut off with a surprised grunt when he grabbed her in a fierce hug.

 

“Thank you,” he sobbed into her hair.

 

 

 


	14. Chapter 14

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Fourteen**

 

Once again, I'd like to thank anyone who reviewed, especially those who did so in detail. I'm always dying to know what the regular readers think, good or bad. We're reaching the 'answers' arc of the story finally. I will still be quite busy over the Christmas period but I hope to find time to update as often as I can.

 

BTW, this chapter has something of an 'image song' or at least a song I listened to quite a lot when writing it. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOTgwOK7rqc

 

…..

 

_**The day she went missing:** _

 

_There was a brief moment, a sort of drunken haze, in which she was sure that the pictures she was looking at weren't real. It was too awful, too sickening to believe it was real. It had to be some sort of hallucination. Things like this only happened in fiction or in distant news stories to kids who were far enough removed from her own existence that they might as well have been fictional too._

 

_It was cliché to say she never thought it would happen to her, but it was true._

 

_Her homework wasn't finished (she'd not been able to stay awake long enough to get through the entire assignment) and her ancient computer had blinked out for whatever reason, and rather than wait for it to cool off she'd taken what she could salvage on a memory stick and gone into her father's home office to print it. While there, she had clicked a numbered folder on the desktop out of idle curiosity (Bob usually named his files) and-_

 

_The reality of it took a while to sink in, and when it did a lot of things she had wondered about suddenly made sense._

 

_The foamy drool._

 

_The stomach pains._

 

_Bob insisting on cooking for them every evening._

 

_Falling asleep over her homework._

 

_Not being able to remember going to bed._

 

_Waking up with her clothes on backwards._

 

_Those bruises._

 

_She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. She wanted to be sick. More than anything, she wanted to be as far away from Bob Pataki as humanly possible._

 

_But there was that small shred of her more pragmatic self, that told her the evidence needed to be preserved because once Bob knew that she knew, he'd cover his tracks and put the blame back on her. Numb and with shaking hands, she copied the entire folder to the memory stick._

 

_Then she fled the house, forgetting her socks and jacket in her haste._

 

… _.._

 

_School was background noise._

 

_Her thoughts swirled in an endless unhappy vortex._

 

_**How many strangers had seen those photographs? How many had contacted Bob with requests?** _

 

_She just shook her head when Mrs Goldfarb called on her in class, and since she was usually such a good student Mrs Goldfarb let it go, with no more than a comment after the bell rang that she should see the school nurse._

 

_**She could give the memory stick to the police. They would arrest Bob. He'd do jail time, for certain.** _

 

_Phoebe asked if she was feeling okay, but when she murmured something about just being tired, Phoebe happily changed the subject to talk about plans she had made with Gerald._

 

_**But what then? Bob was the only one keeping the household together. Miriam was getting worse all the time, she leaned on Bob like a crutch. With Bob gone she'd probably drink herself to death.** _

 

_She picked at her lunch, tore holes in the bread and stabbed her straw through the milk until it was dripping from all angles._

 

_**There was Olga...but she'd be all smiles and tears and ice-cream and big sisterly concern until it hit her that she had to be responsible for someone else's life and resentment would set in hard. Olga would snap like a twig under the pressure. And that's if she even believed what she was told.** _

 

_She skipped fourth period and sat in the bathroom, vomited twice. Retched until she thought every trace of the poison Bob had put in her was gone._

 

_**Someone might step in to adopt her in the aftermath. Patrick's mom, or Phoebe's. And then a previously only child would have to put up with their parent's attention cut in half. They would end up hating her, and she couldn't bear that.** _

 

_She spent most of fifth period dragging her pen across her worksheet until it was nearly entirely black._

 

_**She'd be taken into foster care. She was too old, too bitter and not cute enough to be adopted and would end up in that no-man's-land between state care and adulthood. And foster carers were a mixed bag. She could end up with someone just as bad as Bob, if not worse.** _

 

_At the beginning of sixth period, Arnold walked up to her desk and asked if she was okay. And despite herself, despite resigning herself long ago to the fact that it was never going to happen, she felt that familiar flutter in her chest._

 

“ _I'm fine,” she replied quickly, not even looking at him but facing another scribbled-in worksheet. “Why?”_

 

“ _You look really pale,” he told her, blunt but kind. “I can take you to the nurse if you want-?”_

 

_There was that selfless compassion that had made her fall for him in the first place. She had managed not to cry all day, but hot tears pinched at the corners of her eyes now. By so little she was undone._

 

“ _The day's nearly over,” she said, slumping forward a bit and holding her head in her hand. It was a handy way of disguising her expression. “I'll be okay, I just have to get through this class.”_

 

“ _Well....” he said, uncertain. “If you're sure...”_

 

“ _I'm sure,” she said. “Thanks, Arnold.”_

 

“ _Any time.”_

 

_And then he was gone._

 

… _.._

 

_One thing was for certain; she wasn't going home._

 

_Patrick was on vacation with his family, although he would have been happy to help._

 

_She called Phoebe, but as soon as Phoebe answered the phone she couldn't find the words._

 

“ _I need to stay over tonight,” she blurted out. “Please.”_

 

“ _Helga, I already told you Gerald's coming over tonight. My mom and dad are meeting him for the first time. You can stay tomorrow night if....”_

 

“ _No, it has to be tonight,” Helga interrupted. “Look, something's happened....I called the police but Officer Plaskett's not there, I'm going to see him tomorrow....I have everything on a stick, I need to give it to him as soon as I can...”_

 

_Phoebe sighed, put down the phone for a moment to answer a question from her mother, and in doing so betrayed the fact that she was only half-listening._

 

“ _I really have to go,” Phoebe said. “I'll call you later, okay?”_

 

“ _Okay,” she replied, and hung up, despondent._

 

… _.._

 

_She sat on a park bench for a long time._

 

_The cave had running water nearby but she needed paraffin for the stove and a generator to keep her phone charged. It had only ever been a short-term solution._

 

_Even if she could afford to rent a motel room, who would rent to an unaccompanied minor?_

 

_Pocaselas was nearby, and she could take a bus. From there she could get to pretty much anywhere, and it was full of refuges. That's why so many runaways ended up there. Then again, they'd want to take her name at the refuge and she'd probably be sent straight back to Bob._

 

_In the end, the weather forced her hand. The sun was setting fast and the street lights were coming on, and it was starting to rain. Whatever she needed to do, she could do it in the morning. She stopped at the convenience store to get a bag of chips and a soda (a pretty poor dinner but she wasn't hungry anyway. She felt like she would never be hungry again)and made her way to the mountain range on the outskirts of Hillwood._

 

_That was the last time Helga Geraldine Pataki was seen alive._

 

… _.._

 

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

 

As skeptical as Helga sounded, Arnold noted with amusement that she was somewhat dressed up. Blue-and-white floral sundress, blue sweater, ballet pumps.

 

“I'm very sure,” he told her. “I need a distraction, so do you.”

 

Gertie was still in the hospital pending her mental faculty test results and Phil was still with her, so while they were gone school was an afterthought. The boarding house was having its needs met by Arnold just about, and since he was already skipping school he needed to keep his promise to Helga to take her out.

 

_Especially now that he owed her so much, he couldn't imagine what might have happened to his grandmother if Helga hadn't noticed her leaving and followed her..._

 

“I won't argue,” she shrugged. “But don't you need a break? You've been working all morning...”

 

“Nope,” he answered, dragging out his bike. “Now get in the basket and let's go.”

 

He bought one ticket, one popcorn and one soda once they were at the cinema (she hadn't shown any inclination towards eating or drinking in all this time) but once they were seated and the movie started, it felt in all respects like Arnold was a normal kid on a date with a normal girl (even with her laughing when one of the panicky peripheral characters got his head graphically chopped off). She leaned over to whisper about the bleeding neck stump looking fake and he smiled and nodded.

 

This...was doable.

 

He could take her to movies and buy her clothes. They could watch TV together in the evenings and shop for groceries. Maybe they could even plan vacations together. It was certain that he'd be staying to run the boarding house once he graduated, and she didn't seem able to move too far beyond it without fading out.

 

Arnold had tossed all ideas of dating out the window when his social life tanked. He didn't have time to pay the kind of attention girls his age wanted from their boyfriends, and what college-aged girl would come home every weekend just to spend time with him? But Helga was rooted there, and they enjoyed each other's company. He wanted to make her happy, and he had a feeling she felt the same way about him (why else would she do all his homework?)

 

She had been on his mind since she disappeared. It was only natural that he would develop feelings for her.

 

Just as he was letting those thoughts simmer, he felt her flinch beside him at the sound of a gunshot. He looked over at her with concern, and found she had gone rigid as a plank of wood, staring at the screen but not really _seeing_ it.

 

“Helga?” he whispered, giving her a little shake.

 

She flinched again, blinked slowly and shook her head, rubbing at her forehead just under the star-shaped wound.

 

“You okay?” he asked.

 

“Yeah,” she stammered, lowering her hand. “Just had a....weird moment.”

 

He'd assumed the star-shaped wound was caused by her being hit in the head with something heavy, but her reaction to the sound of the gun was opening up a new possibility.

 

_Surely if it's a gunshot wound, it would be bigger?_

 

_None of the Black Gulch Ripper's victims were shot._

 

…..

 

They went to the pier after the movie, to watch the sun set lazily as they had when they were kids. Although the gun question was still playing on Arnold's mind, it was peaceful at the pier. Seagulls squabbled over tide leavings and you could just about make out the silhouettes of dolphins in the distance.

 

“Do you think I'll go to heaven?”

 

The question surprised him so much he nearly fell into the water.

 

“W-what?” he blurted out.

 

“I said, do you think I'll go to heaven? When all this is over,” she pressed, trailing her bare feet in the water below.

 

“I guess,” he shrugged, still a bit perturbed. “Why wouldn't you?”

 

“I dunno,” she said. “I was a pretty rotten kid.”

 

“No, you weren't...”

 

“Yes, I was,” she insisted, folding her arms. “I was a bully, and I was spiteful and I could never keep my mouth shut.”

 

“But none of that was your fault,” Arnold told her. “I mean...you did the best you could with what you had to work with...and kids can be really crappy sometimes but they grow out of it...”

 

“You were never crappy,” she told him.

 

“I had my moments, like anyone else. Anyway, you did a lot of good...you looked after that third grader the other kids were picking on....who else would have done that?”

 

She hummed quietly, looking down into the water.

 

“What kind of God would hold stuff you did when you were a kid against you?” Arnold pondered, looking up at the sky. “Maybe if you're here because of that God, you wouldn't want any part of his heaven.”

 

“That's pretty deep,” she laughed, and he was glad to hear her laughter.

 

“I don't think you need to worry about heaven,” he said. “You don't have to go anywhere. You can stay here.”

 

It happened without him realizing how close he had gotten to her; he had been inching his way towards her since she said the word 'heaven.' And suddenly he was holding her gently puzzled face in his hands, and it was so warm and alive he could feel the blood pulsing through her veins and the breath from her mouth fanning across his own.

 

He kissed her.

 

In that moment, it was glorious. Her mouth opened under his, to protest or to kiss him back he didn't know, but his senses were full of her. Her scent, her taste, the life in her body...it felt like as long as he kept kissing her he could bring her fully back into reality and the last five years would just be an unpleasant memory.

 

But it could only last a moment.

 

She pulled back and pushed him away, breathing hard and flushed and never so beautiful as in the aftermath of being kissed.

 

“That shouldn't have happened,” she told him sternly.

 

“Why not?” he pressed urgently, because he wanted her face back in his hands. He wanted to feel the blood pumping under her skin again.

 

“I'm _dead,_ Arnold,” she said, and to his horror tears began slipping from her eyes. “This could only end badly for you...”

 

“No, it doesn't have to,” he insisted, reaching for her again. “We don't have to keep looking for who took you. You can stay as you are, I'll look after you....And eventually Phoebe might be able to see you too, it won't always be just me. You can stay at the boarding house with me, it'll be okay.”

 

“No,” she said firmly, wiping savagely at her eyes. “There's no future for you if I let that happen. People will think you've gone crazy.”

 

“I don't care.”

 

“ _I_ care,” she insisted. “You know, when I was alive all I ever wanted....”

 

He didn't hear the end of that because Helga broke off with heaving sobs, and when Arnold tried to put his arms around her she pushed him away.

 

“This is going to end,” she said through clenched teeth. “We're going to find out who killed me and then I'm going to fade away, heaven or hell. And you can get on with the rest of your life.”

 

It sounded so bitterly final. Arnold wiped away the tears that were in his own eyes, and wasn't particularly surprised that when his vision cleared she had already faded away.

 

 

 

 


	15. Chapter 15

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Fifteen**

 

To all my regular readers, thank you for your patience. The holidays are always busy for me and this year in particular, I'm literally just in from a trip overseas. Thank you also for the reviews I've gotten lately, I cannot tell you how much I enjoy reading your thoughts.

 

Although this fic is still quite a ways from being complete, I would like to write more for the Hey Arnold fandom, it's been such a nice place to park my boat. I'd like to hear what kind of fics you want to read after Missing has run its course, please don't be shy.

 

Warning: This chapter might be a bit too much for anyone with a sensitive disposition. Be forewarned going in.

 

…..

 

_**Details of the Helga Pataki Case that were not revealed to the general public, only to law personnel on a need-to-know basis:** _

 

_***The father of the missing child, Robert Pataki, was arrested for and eventually given a custodial sentence of seven years for making and distributing obscene images of children. He was given a further three years for obstruction, namely attempting to destroy the evidence. The mother of the missing child, Miriam Pataki, was questioned under a lie detector and seemed to be unaware of her husband's activities.** _

 

_***The family were known to Child Protective Services, as Helga Pataki had been flagged multiple times by school staff, concerned parents of the child's friends and three healthcare workers. Several meetings were called by the social workers in charge of this family's welfare but no steps were taken to remove the child ('unwillingness to talk' was cited as a reason, as well as a 'combative attitude' in the child in question.)** _

 

_***Medical and dental records pertaining to Helga Pataki were scattered and hard to trace, due to the family's neglecting to have a set general practitioner or any dental work done on their younger child. Some private medical notes received from both a local free clinic in East Bryantson and a Dr Ellis Callaghan in Hillwood's pediatric clinic indicated that the child was usually in good health but was mildly malnourished, suffered from stress-related insomnia and had a habit of teeth-grinding.** _

 

_***A call from Helga Pataki's cellphone to Officer Michael Plaskett was logged at 3:15pm, and again in increments of ten minutes up until 5:30pm.** _

 

_***The last phone call not made to the officer was made to Phoebe Heyerdahl, a school friend, at 5:22pm. After that, there is no recorded use of the phone made on the account.** _

 

_***A description and photo of Helga Pataki were sent to morgues around the surrounding states, and triggered three possible fits. Two of these turned out to be badly disfigured in traffic accidents and did not match the height or age range, and the other was an undersized adult woman.** _

 

_***Notes sent around to police offices flagged that the child was a possible Black Gulch Ripper victim, although she did not fit the Ripper's M.O. The bodies found had been getting progressively younger before he went quiet.** _

 

_***Scraps of pink cotton fabric, a possible match to the dress Helga Pataki had been wearing, were found on the outskirts of Blackstone, three miles from Pocaselas. Blood spatters were detected on the fabric but a DNA match could not be made due to incomplete medical records.** _

 

_***Traces of a child's blonde hair were found wrapped around a rock sixteen miles into the Hillwood mountain range, to the South. It is thought this was an effort by the abductor to distract scent dogs. Again, a DNA match could not be made but tests proved the hair belonged to an adolescent girl between the age of ten and thirteen.** _

 

… _ **.**_

 

Looking from the screen printouts to the forest and back was getting tiresome, but Arnold persisted. A crawling sense that he owed it to Helga, to make up for his clumsiness the day before, kept him painstakingly trying to match the images.

 

Never mind that a forest was always changing, so you could never trust it to look the same from day to day, never mind year to five years later.

 

…..

 

_She was asleep when he came back, curled up on his bed, still wearing her shoes. He guessed she might have made it as far as the bed before collapsing. Careful not to touch her, he removed her shoes and draped the comforter over her._

 

_Then he stretched out on the couch to spend a long, sleepless night worrying about what she'd say when she woke up._

 

… _.._

 

“Are you getting anything?” Phoebe called breathlessly from about fifty yards behind him.

 

He shrugged, and looked to Helga for her input. She was stock-still, hand at her mouth, unsure.

 

“Not right now,” he called back. “Maybe if we get in a bit further...”

 

They were already tired; Pocaselas was a long bus trip from Hillwood, and getting past the Gulch into the forest was a tough hike. Not to mention Arnold was running on little sleep, tense from what had happened the day before and more than a little nervous about having Phoebe tag along trailing possibly after someone who had murdered women and girls not much older than her...

 

…..

 

“ _Just forget it,” Helga said when she finally woke up. “It was a moment of madness. It won't happen again.”_

 

“ _Yeah,” Arnold agreed, though it felt wrong in his mind, in his very throat. “Okay.”_

 

…..

 

The only thing left to do was to press on, try their best to follow the trail left behind. If they did find out what happened to Helga, there was a slight possibility that she wouldn't disappear. There was every chance she would stay behind, forever. And between haunting a lonely boarding house by herself and entering into some mutual madness with Arnold, what was the smarter choice?

 

_She kissed me back. I know she did._

 

He spun a few degrees west, held up another printout and squinted. The mountain range was right, but two of the trees had gone since the photo he was working from had been made. ( _Lightning strike? Wildfire? Deforestation? Who knew?)_

 

Phoebe caught up just as he was measuring the distance between two crops of trees.

 

“Remind me why we're doing this again?” she gasped. Her glasses were foggy with sweat.

 

“I showed Helga a bunch of google images of Pocaselas and printed the ones she reacted to,” he told her, holding up the photo of the same crops of trees. “So we could get a possible match on her last known whereabouts.”

 

“Yeah,” Phoebe huffed. “Doesn't sound like any less of a long shot the second time you said it. Just checking.”

 

“You didn't have to come,” Arnold retorted.

 

“Yes, she did,” Helga said quietly, distractedly.

 

“Yes, I did,” Phoebe replied with a tinge of venom.

 

“Then stop grousing and help,” he said, handing her a few sheets. “Check the topography map, see where we are.”

 

Grumbling under her breath, Phoebe did as she was told.

 

Arnold's eyes flicked from the printouts to Helga and back. She was tense, he could feel nervous energy running off of her in a steady stream. Something about this place had her on edge, and that meant they were close to a breakthrough.

 

… _.._

 

“ _That one,” she said suddenly, and at the sharp edge that had jumped into her voice Arnold stopped scrolling with a jolt._

 

“ _That one?” he said, raising his mouse over a small unremarkable crop of trees. “What's special about that one?”_

 

“ _I don't know,” she replied, staring at the image hard. “I just know I've seen it before.”_

 

… _.._

 

She was wandering away, and he knew he had to give her space to think if they were to find anything useful, but his eyes were drawn to her regardless. In the shadow of the trees, for the first time she looked like a ghost to him, marked transparent by dapples of sunlight and patches of murky darkness. She looked like with one wrong turn she would phase into the trees like some ancient woodland spirit.

 

“I can see her more clearly now,” Phoebe said suddenly, staring off into the trees the same way Arnold was. “She's wearing jeans, right? And her hair is down.”

 

“Yeah, that's right,” Arnold said with a genuinely glad smile.

 

“It's long,” Phoebe said, wrinkling her nose in good-humoured puzzlement. “Like, down to her waist? She would never have let it get that long normally....isn't that weird?”

 

“It is kind of odd...”

 

He hadn't thought much about it before, but it was strange. Why would her hair have grown out if she was dead?

 

“Arnold, this is the wrong place,” Phoebe said, swiftly changing the subject by yanking the printout from his hands. “Wrong trees.”

 

“How do you know?”

 

“Because _that,”_ she explained, stabbing one finger at a spindly tree to the front of the tree cluster on the sheet, “is a mountain hemlock tree. And there's three more in that patch. There's no hemlock on this side of the hill.”

 

“Huh,” he said. “I knew I had a reason to bring you here. So where do we find a hemlock tree?”

 

“This way,” she said, jogging down the trail in the direction Helga had gone.

 

…..

 

It was close to two hours before they stopped, finally locating the hemlock tree that matched the one on the sheet. Arnold laid out the printouts on the forest floor, matching them as best he could, looking over them from his seat on a protruding tree root. All in all, together they depicted almost a full square mile of the forest.

 

But....there was nothing there.

 

Just trees, lots of them, some spongy forest floor with leaf litter and a few sinkholes, some rock outcroppings and a slowly descending mist from the upper mountain peaks.

 

_What happened here? Did anything happen here?_

 

If Helga was tense before, she was visibly agitated now. She couldn't stop moving, folding and unfolding her arms, fiddling with her hair, biting at her knuckles. Her eyes darted and she paced in circles. It put Arnold in mind of a small animal backed into a corner.

 

“Is she okay?”Phoebe whispered. “I can't see her face...”

 

“She's jumpy,” Arnold whispered back.

 

Helga circled the clearing in widening arcs, until suddenly she froze. Arnold jumped to his feet and was rushing to her side even before she started screaming.

 

“What? What is it?” he shouted.

 

“Is that her screaming?” Phoebe cried, hurrying behind him. “Why is she screaming?”

 

She was just outside the clearing, stuck in place before a sheer drop-off that had been hidden by the trees. When Arnold touched her shoulder and gently tried to jostle her, he found it impossible to move her even slightly. She clutched her head, so hard that in his own panic Arnold was worried she was hurting herself.

 

“It's burning!” she spat out in between screams. “I'm on fire, I'm burning!”

 

“No, no,” he tried to tell her. “You're not burning....you're with me and Phoebe, you're safe with us...”

 

“It burns!” she repeated, over and over, quieter only because her voice was cracking and strained. “It hurts!”

 

“Do something,” Phoebe hissed and shoved him.

 

_Do what?_

 

He did the only thing he could think of. He threw down his stuff and swept Helga up in his arms, off of the ground. He buried her head under his and held her as close as possible.

 

“You're not burning,” he whispered in her ear. “You're okay, I've got you.”

 

It seemed to work, at least a little, because she stopped screaming and although she was crying, it was quiet and relatively calm. Her breathing lost that frenzied wheeze and hitch and although shaky, it was steady. That was more than he could say for his own heart, which was hammering a panicky beat and sending beads of cold sweat trickling down his back.

 

She was going to fade out, he knew she would. It didn't make it any easier when she did, and left him holding nothing but air.

 

“Jesus Christ,” he heard Phoebe mutter behind him.

 

_I need to get back home. I can't leave her alone right now._

 

But, equally, that reaction spoke volumes. This place was important.

 

“Was it the marshlands that did it?” Phoebe asked gingerly.

 

“What marshlands?” Arnold asked, when he found his voice.

 

“Those marshlands,” she said, pointing towards the drop-off.

 

He stepped as close to the edge of the cliff as he dared, and sure enough they had found the notoriously-difficult-to-travel-through wetlands, full of snakes and leeches and mosquitoes and all other creepy crawlies that made muddy water their home.

 

“Maybe,” he agreed, though he was unsure.

 

Phoebe picked up the topography map and stared down at it, frowning. Arnold walked backwards, tracing his steps back through the clearing.

 

_She was okay until she got to that spot. What happened there? Where did she go from?_

 

The forest floor was bare, as far as he could see. What was he missing?

 

He closed his eyes, concentrated on the dead leaves crunching under his hiking boots, the wind blowing through the trees, the slight spring of the soil....

 

...until that spring wasn't there. The ground was different in the patch he just stepped on. More solid.

 

Arnold opened his eyes. Visually, it wasn't any different, covered in as much dead leaves and forest debris as everywhere else. But there was something strange about the way the ground underneath felt. He tapped his foot.

 

A quiet but distinctly hollow sound echoed from the nearest sinkhole.

 

_Not a sinkhole. It's too clean._

 

He put his hand in the hole and felt around the edge, but drew back with a hiss when whatever was forming the hole sliced his finger open.

 

_That's metal._

 

He pushed away as much of the forest litter as he could, and managed to uncover something that had clearly gone unnoticed for a long time given how much moss and other gunk was growing on it.

 

A large metal door in the forest floor. The hole was an oversized patch of rust. It was heavy, but not so heavy he couldn't lift it.

 

“Is that....?” Arnold heard Phoebe say over the screech of the rusted hinges.

 

He looked inside. And in less than a minute slammed it shut.

 

“Arnold? Is that a...” Phoebe said, stepping forward.

 

“NO!” he shouted, loud enough to scare away the few birds that hadn't budged for Helga's earlier screaming. “Don't come over here!”

 

“What? What's in there....?”

 

“Phoebe,” he begged, holding up his hands to physically stop her if he needed to. “Stay where you are. You don't need to see this.”

 

“Is she in there?” she asked, her voice rising high and strident. “Arnold, IS SHE IN THERE!?!”

 

“Don't look,” he begged her. “Please. Go back downhill. Call the police.”

 

Phoebe didn't say another word, but turned and ran down the trail. He didn't even look at her, but he didn't have to. She probably looked as sick as he felt.

 

_What were you expecting? Did you really think anything good would come of this?_

 

It had only been a quick look inside the ( _bunker?hole?burrow?)_ but a quick look was all it took to connect the dots.

 

The chains coupled to the wall.

 

The steel cage in the corner, just about big enough for a large dog or a small human.

 

The table covered with rusted tools; pliers, hammers, screwdrivers, and enough blades to suit any working butcher.

 

The big metal tub, covered in streaks of rust and something else.

 

Stacked wooden crates buzzing with flies.

 

And sitting in the middle of it all, spread across a chopping board with what looked like a meat cleaver hovering over it, was Helga's pink dress.

 

 


	16. Chapter 16

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Sixteen**

 

 

Content warning; This chapter would likely be better off skipped if you are sensitive to distressing content, even moreso than the last chapter. I'm giving an insight into the culprit's state of mind, it's more of a side chapter than anything and you won't miss much by giving it a miss. If you think you can handle it, please proceed.

 

And as always, thank you for any and all reviews. Honestly I was going to leave this chapter until the end of the week but reviews are my prime source of motivation.

 

…..

 

_**Black Gulch Ripper found at last?** _

 

_**Suspect arrested after the remains of seventeen women found along with DNA evidence.** _

 

_**Waleska native extradited from Mexico** _

 

…..

 

If you were to point to any occurrences in the life of Curtis Michael Waring that directly lead to the crimes he would later commit against women, three incidents stand out.

 

The morning he saw his mother sneaking three spoonfuls of Clorox into his father's oatmeal as payback for slapping her the night before.

 

The death of Annette Murdoch, a popular girl that he (and most of the high school's boys) had a crush on, by shotgun wielded by her mother's drunken boyfriend.

 

The hunting trip that went badly wrong when he aimed his shotgun at a moose calf, missed and was trampled by the calf's furious mother, sustaining head injuries that some said he never really recovered from.

 

However, if you were to ask Maryanne Waring, if she'd been alive, what might have driven her son to do such horrible things, she might have laughed hoarsely and blown a smoke ring in your face.

 

“Boy was just damn _mean,”_ she would have said.

 

Curtis himself would have disagreed. He didn't do what he had done to the women to be _mean._ Indeed, for some of them death should have been a relief, given what their lives had been like before he found them. Problem was, they weren't what he needed and he didn't like to waste resources.

 

He had a very set, very specific criteria for the woman he wanted.

 

*She had to be intelligent, able to keep a decent conversation going. (Annette Murdoch had been a straight-A student.)

*She had to be pretty, not necessarily supermodel-beautiful but she should have a good smile at least.

 

*She had to be blonde. The hair could be dyed, but a natural blonde was better.

 

*She had to be petite. At least small enough for him to lift over his head easily. Getting in and out of the bunker would be a challenge for a larger woman.

 

*She had to have modest curves, not too big or too small. A C-cup at most, with narrow hips.

 

*She had to be obedient. He could tolerate the odd argument but if she got pleasure out of riling him up that was too much.

 

*She had to be willing to leave everything behind to live in the woods. The world was rapidly going to shit and they could end up being the only two left in the end.

 

You couldn't find a woman like that hanging around at the local bar, or via internet dating or working as a barista in the local coffee shop. In the beginning he'd found some girls on the survivalist web forums, and they talked a big game about leaving modern society to fester but in the end they were too attached to their comforts. Likewise, talk like that tended to scare off potentials he met off the web.

 

He joined the marine corp and served just one tour before he was given a dishonorable discharge (for harassing one of the med girls, that's what she said anyway.) The marines was good for him, he never had the physique or the battle instinct but training sharpened his skills with both guns and blades and gave him the certainty that he could survive in any circumstances.

 

His birthplace Waleska City had nothing to offer him and Pocaselas happened by chance, his bus stopped there overnight and he felt that the seedy little hub, surrounded by forest, suited him just fine. He built the bunker in a patch of forest everyone gave a wide berth, confident he would make a better life for himself there.

 

The first woman was an accident.

 

She was a streetwalker, unusually pretty and probably new to the street. She was nervous in an endearing way, rather sweet but not too bright. He had her twice, the third time she agreed to go to the bunker with him but changed her mind and refused to get out of the car. When he insisted (having paid her and not wanting to waste his money) she started screaming. Irritated, he tried to smack the hysteria out of her and ended up hitting her far too hard.

 

She probably wasn't dead, just unconscious, but he had already wasted money, gas and energy on her. Snapping her neck just to make sure was easy enough, and disposing of the body in the marshlands was easier still.

 

Later on he realized he had made a mistake; it was close to hibernation season, and hungry bears would be prowling looking for food in places they didn't normally cross. He couldn't retrieve the body, it had already sank into the marsh, but he took the internal organs from deer he hunted and laid them off to the west to lead bears or other predators away from the bunker. (Old hunting wisdom said offal smelled stronger and more attractive to wild animals.)

 

The second woman was sort of an accident. She was older, had been working the street for a long time and her hair had that unnatural tint of a bottle blonde, but she was pretty enough if she kept her mouth shut. She agreed to go to the bunker, and made it as far as the door in the forest floor before she got cold feet and demanded to be brought back to town. He knocked her out and lifted her inside the bunker, but when she came to she was no more agreeable. The hammer had made its way into his hand without him even thinking, he had just picked up whatever was closest.

 

Her organs were planted far from the bunker to keep those pesky bears away. Waste not, want not.

 

The third woman made it to the bunker and stayed there for three days, but as soon as her heroin withdrawal kicked in properly she was a nuisance. She was planted and the body buried beside the second woman.

 

Fourth, fifth and sixth cemented what a mess he was making of his plan. He couldn't bury any more bodies without attracting scavengers, and although the planting was working it left him with the rest of the corpse to dispose of. He ended up dumping them in the river that bordered the marshlands, where the rushing water landed them in the Black Gulch.

 

None of these women were good candidates for the plan. They weren't smart enough, they kept getting in his car knowing someone was picking up and murdering prostitutes. The ones he managed to keep around for a while, to 'improve' them, still ended up hollowed out in the Gulch or dismembered and buried near the bunker if he was feeling lazy or the weather was bad.

 

The problem was, these women were too far gone. When he picked them they were already broken, from whatever hell had driven them to Pocaselas or just what prostitution had done to their souls. They were either too dead inside to make any improvement or too mentally fragile. Even the youngest of them was prematurely aged by the time he got to them.

 

After almost two decades of finding and disposing of Pocaselas' streetwalkers, the thought of getting a child occurred to him. He had no attraction to children, but the idea of raising the child to be his perfect woman was tempting.

 

Logistically though, it was a nightmare. He had never tried to bring a normal woman to the bunker, knowing that if he tried and then needed to dispose of her it would be noticed. Her friends, family, her whole town maybe, would be tracing her in a way that didn't happen with streetwalkers. A child going missing would prompt even more of an outcry.

 

The thought of adopting a child from some third-world hellhole or an East Europe baby dump, or even just picking up one of the many orphans from places that had been bombed to shreds crossed his mind, but he dismissed it. Even foreign agencies wouldn't adopt out a kid to a discharged single man, and besides which he knew most of those kids were as damaged as the streetwalkers, just a hell of a lot sooner.

 

He needed a healthy normal child, from somewhere nearby, whose circumstances would delay suspicion just long enough for him to get her into the bunker. Someone whose guardians wouldn't call the cops straight away. And he lucked out on the first search of the dark web with a picture of an eleven-year-old girl whose Daddy didn't know how to keep his mouth shut.

 

The girl had what Maryanne Waring would have called 'that ugly-duckling look'; features that would have been awkward on a child and were pretty on an adolescent in a sort-of unfinished way, and would probably be gorgeous once she reached full maturity. When his forum buddies asked the poster (and the girl's father) what she was like, he replied that she was a wise-ass who thought she was smarter than everyone else.

 

Intelligence. Two of his criteria met in one go. Three because she was a natural blonde.

 

Waring knew from the girl's father blabbing far too much information (and really, it was a miracle he hadn't been caught yet) that they lived near Pocaselas, on the coast. He guessed Hillwood, and from there it was just a matter of tracing anyone that might know her. That turned out to be ridiculously easy, because unsupervised children in chatrooms on the internet often gave out too much information.

 

After chatting to ten or so young girls who were looking for older boys, he found one who lived in Hillwood and sent her the most innocuous of the pictures he had of the girl. Not only did his silly chat-mate know the girl, she also gave him her name and where she went to school.

 

_Helga._

 

He rented a cheap motel room in the next town over, gave a story that he was helping his brother build an extension, and spent several days trying to find the girl. When he did finally cross her path, he nearly grabbed her off the street there and then.

 

_She was **perfect**._

 

Not too young to fall apart during the 'improvements' but not too old to be molded to his liking. Not tall but not stumpy either. Trim-figured but not a string-bean. Pretty enough to have boys hanging around her but she didn't court their attention or revel in it. She had the most potential.

 

He tread carefully, found reasons to be near the batting cages when she was practicing or by the school when she was walking home. She was a latchkey kid, it seemed, came and went as she pleased. It was hard to find where she lived at first, she bounded from house to house and sometimes cycled out of town altogether only to pop up again the next day.

 

Three weeks of watching her carefully led him into the woods, and it couldn't have been more perfect. He could reach the bunker through the woods, it was at least a day and a half of walking but he knew the forest well enough. He couldn't find her hideout though, she was too fast for that and he didn't want to follow too closely behind.

 

He found her walking her bike, with the front tire flat, one morning. He offered a lift, and when she refused him he pumped up her tire for him. He was glad she was smart enough to refuse the lift; it was a good sign.

 

He drove back to Pocaselas and went to the bunker to collect some instruments.

 

A hypodermic needle and sedative.

 

A large crate with straps for his back.

 

A blanket and a cloth.

 

Cotton gloves.

 

Heavy rubber boots.

 

A shotgun, just in case.

 

A hunting knife, also just in case.

 

He staked out a patch of forest and waited for two days, until he saw her walking the trail to wherever her little burrow was. He let her spend one more night there, and caught her on the trail the next morning.

 

She did fight him when he grabbed her, but he had thrown the blanket over her and used it to pin her to the ground. The needle shoved into her neck put her to sleep much slower than he had anticipated, and she got a few good screams and kicks in before she slumped over and stopped fighting, but nobody was around to hear. He turned her over and sliced a scrap of her dress with the hunting knife, but in his haste he sliced too close to her skin and left a long mark on her leg.

 

Oh well. He wiped it with the scrap, all the better for distracting scent dogs. The blood would carry them off well away from the bunker.

 

She weighed so little when he picked her up and packed her into the box, and carrying her back through the woods was so easy he was kicking himself that he hadn't thought of it sooner.

 

 

 

…..

 

She didn't beg or cry when she woke up, but watched him cautiously and asked a few bare questions. Smart girl. Even so, he detected a willful streak in her that would have to be managed.

 

On day one, he took her clothes. He measured her dimensions in detail and wrote them carefully in a notebook. He cut a chunk from the back of her hair to plant a few miles away. No missing child alerts had been filed as of yet, but he knew they would use dogs. They usually did.

 

On day two, she asked for her clothes back. He slapped her hard, and she didn't ask again.

 

On day five, he caught her trying to climb up to the door of the bunker. She told him she needed fresh air, and he had to agree, so he took her above ground. He didn't trust her not to try and run, but he had made a collar for her out of a piece of steel and attached it to a long chain.

 

He measured her every day. She was losing weight, but also losing muscle. He added extra protein to her diet. By now they were looking for her, but the plants had sent them in the wrong direction.

 

Two weeks in, she asked again for her clothes. When he slapped her again, she didn't drop the subject but told him she was due on her menstrual cycle and didn't want to bleed all over his floor. That made sense, and he was sorry for slapping her, but the clothes interfered with his monitoring and measuring.

 

“Just underwear then,” she asked. “It's cold down here.”

 

He gave her back her panties and gave her a bra that had belonged to one of the failed projects. It was far too big for her but it made it easier for him to watch her growth, so they were both happy.

 

_Happy?_

 

She was restless, and though he had given her a perfectly good bed in the kitchen alcove he could hear her wandering at night. He knew she was looking for a way out. He drove out to Pocaselas and bought an extra-large dog crate, but even that didn't stop her. He had to padlock the cage at night and keep her collar and chain on, shackled to the wall, just so he could sleep easy.

 

It was worth the effort though. Every day she was growing perfectly, exactly the way he wanted. And she was adapting to captivity well enough, eventually he'd be able to take away the crate and the chains and the collar and she'd stay put like a good dog.

 

Years later, when the police finally tracked him down and hauled him back to Pocaselas, he smiled because somewhere deep down he'd known she would be the one to get him caught.

 

…..

 

Arnold stayed home from school.

 

When the police had made their way up to the newly-discovered bunker and unearthed its secrets for hours, dragging out bags and bags of human remains and forensic evidence, that had been bad.

 

Watching Phoebe's parents arrive at the scene, Phoebe's normally placid father angrily scolding her in Japanese while she sobbed and clung to her mother, was bad.

 

Having his Grandpa drive up three hours later, torn between sympathy and anger that Arnold had gone off and made him worry when he was already up to his neck in worry for his wife, was bad.

 

The wordless drive home and the heavy sigh and shake of his Grandpa's head when he closed Arnold's bedroom door was very bad.

 

But a hundred, a thousand times worse than all of this put together was going into his bedroom and not finding Helga there. She had vanished, but not manifested back at home.

 

He hadn't expected closure to feel so _awful._

 

So he skipped school, lay in bed, staring at the wall. There was a slight scent on his pillow that he knew came from Helga, something damp and clean like flowers after rain. It would fade in time, and then be gone forever, so what was the point in going to school? There was a lifetime of school, work, everything else, and only a little of Helga left to savour.

 

At least they could hold a proper funeral now.

 

His phone rang again, for the fifth time that morning. He didn't want to answer any nosy questions, but he supposed he should get it over with.

 

“Hello?” he croaked.

 

“Arnold? It's Officer Plaskett.”

 

Here was the hammer swing he'd been waiting for, the confirmation to what he already knew. Helga was dead and her body had finally been found.

 

“Son, I need you and your friend Phoebe down here as soon as possible,” Officer Plaskett said.

 

“Why?” Arnold drawled. “Don't they identify bodies at the morgue?”

 

“Don't be a smartass,” the officer growled, the edge in his voice slicing through Arnold's malaise. “This isn't a joke, Arnold. If you and your friend are covering for Helga you need to tell us _now...!”_

 

“Covering for her?” Arnold gasped. “What are you on about?”

 

“We just want to know if she's safe, she won't be in any trouble.”

 

“Trouble? She's dead! Isn't she?”

 

The line went silent, and the silence stretched forever.

 

“Helga's body isn't there,” Plaskett said at last. “I thought you knew....How did you find the bunker if no-one told you?”

 

Arnold dropped his phone, leaving the officer to mumble to himself on an empty line.

 

_Helga's body isn't there._

 

 


	17. Chapter 17

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Seventeen**

 

 

 

Apologies for another long delay, much longer than I would have preferred it to be. I was fairly ill for a while, had a lot of work to catch up on when I recovered, am in the process of moving house and on top of that I volunteered to do six workshops at an event. I should really learn to slow it down.

 

Props to the anonymous Guest who left the last review, that little howl of despair got me moving on this when I might have left it a bit longer.

 

…..

 

There was about five minutes of uncomfortable silence between the three of them, during which Phoebe had her arms folded and stared at the foot of the desk, Officer Plaskett had his hands clasped over his mouth and glared at them both and Arnold's brain was full of nothing but the same jumble of thoughts he'd had since the day before, after the phone call.

 

_Her body's not there._

 

_There's evidence that she was held there but not that she died there._

 

_Why would she disappear for good if we didn't find the body?_

 

“Okay, look,” the Officer said at last. “I know you kids are all about your secrets, but it's doing none of us any good to keep quiet. Just tell me where she is. She's not in trouble...”

 

“We don't know where she is,” Phoebe said sullenly.

 

“Well, I find that hard to believe,” Plaskett scoffed. “We had trained professionals and some of the best tracking dogs combing the hills for clues and got next to nothing. You two kids go off on a jolly hike and come across a mountain of evidence....including the bodies of women who have been on the missing register for _years!?”_

 

“We got lucky,” Phoebe mumbled.

 

“That's not luck, my girl,” Plaskett shot out sternly. “You knew where to look.”

 

“Look, you guys have a pretty big caseload,” Arnold cut in, with what he hoped was a reasonable tone. “I mean, I've been reading up on this case since it happened...I read a whole bunch of theories and then cross-referenced them with what Phoebe knows and then we managed to find the cave. Plus there was some active sabotage on the trail....”

 

“How did you know about that?” Plaskett asked, his eyes glimmering with anger.

 

“It got leaked,” Arnold shrugged. “I read it on a true crime forum. A whole bunch of people guessed that there was sabotage anyway when the dogs couldn't find anything.”

 

Plaskett laughed, an oddly bitter sound.

 

“I'd buy that once, Arnold,” he said. “Just plain dumb luck and some amateur hour sleuthing from a bunch of online crackpots. But to have it happen twice?”

 

Just then, Arnold's phone rumbled in his pocket. Nobody ever really called him except his grandparents and now Phoebe....

 

“You look at that phone and I'm booking you in,” Plaskett snapped.

 

“On what charges?” Arnold gasped incredulously.

 

“Perverting the course of justice.”

 

“That's bullshit and you know it,” Phoebe snarled.

 

“Oh, is it? For all I know you two had something to do with the Pataki girl going missing....”

 

“How _**dare you!**_ _”_

 

“Give me some proper answers and you can go,” he shrugged. “That's all I'm asking.”

 

Arnold's phone started rumbling again, beating an irregular tempo on his leg. In a flash of cold realization he remembered how Helga had tried to call him again and again to warn him about his grandmother....

 

They needed to get out of there, and fast.

 

“Okay, fine,” he mumbled. “We might as well come clean, but I have to warn you, it's pretty dumb.”

 

“I want the truth, dumb or not.”

 

Phoebe glanced over at him, cautiously. He had a plan and she was preparing to run with it, whatever it was.

 

“There was this woman Helga and Phoebe used to see...”

 

Plaskett cocked an eyebrow, and clarity cleared the expression on Phoebe's face.

 

“He said it was dumb,” she said, playing with the end of her braid sheepishly. “It was some grade school crap, she used to make love potions and stuff like that and if you gave her a dollar she'd read your palm so we went there sometimes after school.”

 

“A...psychic?” Plaskett deadpanned.

 

“I suppose,” Phoebe shrugged. “I don't think either of us really believed she could tell our future, but it was fun at the time. Anyway, after Helga went missing I kinda....checked out. I didn't do anything like that for a long time. Then one day, just for the heck of it, I went in and she was still there....and she told me Helga had a message for me.”

 

Plaskett looked surprised, but surprise wasn't the same thing as not believing.

 

“She had me write down a whole lot of random words. I sort of knew about Helga's cave, she said there was something important up there, but I didn't know where to begin and I was too afraid to go by myself. So I asked Arnold to come up there with me.”

 

Arnold was impressed, _very_ impressed. He had given Phoebe the bare bones of an explanation and she had fleshed it out into something credible.

 

“He told me he had map surveys of the area, when we combined what we knew the cave was easy to find,” she continued. “The other place.... some of the words I had were 'Pocaselas,''swamp' and 'cliff'. We cross-referenced it all again and ended up in that part of the forest. We wouldn't have found anything except for Arnold tripping over that hole in the ground.”

 

The silence flooded back in, except for the buzzing of Arnold's phone. A bead of sweat trickled down his spine; he needed out of there, and fast.

 

“I suppose, if I was to find this woman,” Plaskett said at last. “She'd corroborate your story.”

 

“Of course,” Phoebe answered coolly. “She doesn't have a phone but I can give you the address.”

 

“You do that,” he sneered. “I have to say, it's not the first time some mystery has been solved by a so-called psychic, but you have to understand I find this pretty hard to believe.”

 

“Why do you think we didn't want to tell you?” Phoebe said sharply, folding her arms again.

 

“Fine,” he sighed. “You're free to go. Get out of my sight.”

 

…..

 

Outside, Arnold waited for Phoebe to be done leaving the psychic's address at the front desk and he was finally able to check his phone.

 

Six missed calls.

 

All from a number he didn't recognize.

 

It rumbled again, and this time he was able to answer.

 

“Hello?” he cried, near frantic.

 

There was no answer, but he could hear some sort of noise. A sort of distortion, like a voice carried on the wind from far away. There was a click, and it was gone again.

 

He looked at the number properly. The prefix indicated it was a payphone, and if the area code was right it was in the next state over. He could find it, as long as she stayed where she was he could find her again....

 

“That went well,” Phoebe grumbled, stepping outside.

 

“What'll you do if he calls in on the psychic?” Arnold asked.

 

“He won't,” Phoebe shrugged. “They never check up on these things, he got his answer just so he could let it go.”

 

As they left the police station behind, Arnold staring at his phone willing it to ring again, he whispered to Phoebe.

 

“I think Helga's trying to call me,” he told her.

 

“What? Are you serious?”

 

When he'd picked Phoebe up that morning, she'd looked sad but resigned. She thought Helga had found her closure and moved on.

 

“I'm getting calls from a payphone in the next state,” he said. “I think she manifested there instead of at home. Something about that place....she said she was burning before she faded out.”

 

Phoebe's face crumpled, but she regained her composure fast.

 

“Some shit went down there, we already knew that,” she said. “But why the next state? Not Pocaselas or Hillwood?”

 

“That's what I'm going to find out,” Arnold told her, flicking through his smartphone browser to pinpoint the pay-phone's location. “I'm going to go get her.”

 

“Are you sure? That's an overnight bus ride, at least....”

 

“I know, that's why I need you to cover for me. I'm going to call my Grandpa and say I'm spending the next two days at your house.”

 

Phoebe nodded, and smiled.

 

“I shouldn't be happy,” she said. “I know it's probably better if she moved on...but I'm really glad you're going to bring her back.”

 

The phone rang again, and Arnold answered it as fast as his fingers would work.

 

“Helga? If that's you, push the dial pad if you can hear me.”

 

_**Beeeeeep** _

 

“I found the payphone you're at, I'm getting on a bus as soon as I can and I'm going to bring you home. Stay right where you are, I'll try not to take too long, I swear.”

 

_**Beeeeep** _

 

… _ **..**_

 

He didn't bother going home, just picked up some spare clothes at the department store and grabbed a ticket for the cross country bus. It was going through Pocaselas and when he got there he needed to transfer to the courier bus to Tappenack Falls. The payphone was located on a stretch of highway between Tappenack Falls and the Allowicken Woods, both of which were rural outposts known only for truck stops and hundreds of acres of federally protected woodland.

 

In Pocaselas, he slept an uneasy five hours in a dingy motel beside the bus station and rose again close to midnight to catch the courier bus. There was next to no-one on the bus except the driver and a couple of night-shift workers on the local dam project. Arnold was tired, hungry and grimy but still, as he pulled up to his stop to see that Helga was there sitting by the payphone, he could say he had never been so happy.

 

He was a little shocked when, on seeing him, she immediately started weeping, but it was a stressful time for all of them. He pulled her into him in as secure a hug as he could manage and patiently waited until she had gotten all of it out.

 

“Sorry,” she sniffled after a while.

 

“It's okay,” he whispered into her hair. “I'm just glad to see you.”

 

They walked a little down the highway; it was pitch black, the light of his phone wasn't really strong enough to light their way, but there was no traffic at all. She asked him what happened.

 

“I'm quoting Phoebe here, but clearly some shit went down near that swamp,” he said.

 

“Obviously,” she agreed. “I can't exactly remember but I did feel like I'd been there before.”

 

“We found a bunker just a few feet away,” he said, feeling the nausea rise in his throat as he pictured it. “There was a lot of evidence there.”

 

“What kind of evidence?”

 

_How can I tell her?_

 

“Bad stuff, let's leave it at that,” he laughed feebly.

 

“No, I want to know. What did you find?”

 

Arnold gulped, shivered a little in the dark.

 

“Chains. Knives. Guns.”

 

_A dog cage, one big enough for a little girl._

 

“The dress you were wearing when you went missing.”

 

He couldn't see her face in the dark, but he saw the outline of her body stiffen, turn rigid.

 

“We.....I mean, the police.....there was a lot of bodies. But not yours.”

 

He heard her swallow, hard.

 

“Why? Why wouldn't it be there?” she asked.

 

“I don't know,” he told her. “But the guy left DNA evidence everywhere, they caught him. He's been killing women for years and now he's probably going to get the death penalty.”

 

He thought she might say something about that, but she was silent. This, he recognized. He had grown so used to her presence that he could tell without seeing her that she was exhausted and heading for one of her deep sleep sessions.

 

“There should be a motel down here,” he said. “Then we can rest up.”

 

She mumbled something inaudible, half-asleep already.

 

By the time he spotted the neon sign for the roadside motel, he had resorted to carrying her on his back like a child. He left her lolling on the outside bench as he paid for his room, and if the motel owner was surprised to see a lone teenager on this stretch of road at nearly 2am he didn't show it.

 

As he brought her inside and tucked her into bed, her eyes fluttered open and she stared him down.

 

“Why am I still here?” she mumbled, clutching the comforter. “If we found the guy....why haven't I gone yet?”

 

“I don't know,” Arnold answered helplessly.

 

 _But I'm glad you're not gone,_ he didn't have the guts to say.

 

…..

 

Arnold passed the next twenty four hours, while Helga slept, puzzling over where she had ended up. Why Tappenack Falls? It was practically a ghost town; the diner had only three customers that morning including Arnold, and there wasn't even a shop for miles.

 

He brought up as much data as he could on his phone, ignoring texts from Phoebe (after the initial one saying he'd found Helga) and calls from his Grandpa and the school. Sure enough, there was a connection although a vague one. The swamp of Pocaselas was fed by a diverted stream and that same stream was also what fed Tappenack's waterfall. The forests that led to the falls through Allowicken were connected to both Hillwood and Pocaselas but veered south. It was miles of some of the most inhospitable forest land in the USA.

 

After Tappenack, the next actual 'city' was the still-very-small Warleybridge. Flicking through webpages of centennial celebrations, county fairs and minor scandals didn't bring up anything of interest....

 

….right up until the ninth webpage, just as Arnold was about to call it a night.

 

It was a small article in the local newspaper, no pictures, written very plainly, and yet reading it was to be witness to a miracle.

 

_**Serenity Doe enters fourth year sleeping** _

 

_**The unknown girl who was discovered four years ago walking down the Tappenack Falls highway in a distressed state shows no sign of waking any time soon. Doctors and nurses at St Jude's Hospital and Convalescent Home say she is in good health but declined to report anything further.** _

 


	18. Chapter 18

 

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Eighteen**

 

… **..**

 

This chapter is a bit of a style change, and I will offer a content warning although I think if you've made it this far there's not much more I can warn you about. Just tread carefully, because here it gets quite in depth about what Helga experienced.

 

…..

 

_**Five months of solitude:** _

 

_She was lucky, she supposed. The man who had taken her had no intention of killing her, or he would have done it the first time she kicked him and tried to climb out of the bunker. He subdued her quickly and let her know in no uncertain terms that he had killed women for less, but he was willing to overlook her little temper tantrum because she was still a child._

 

_She sat in mute horrified silence as he dictated a list of rules he expected her to follow. Some of the rules contradicted others but he didn't seem to notice._

 

_She could practically smell the crazy coming off of him in waves._

 

_Bob's own brand of abuse had been easy to deal with, he was above all things predictable (or so she thought until she found the photos) and Miriam's neglect was shrugged off because she neglected herself as much as anyone else._

 

_But this guy...._

 

_He seemed calm but there was rage bubbling under the surface (that she recognized) and anything could set him off. He was highly unstable, and that was terrifying._

 

_That said, when he demanded that she undress and, when she didn't move fast enough for his liking, yanked her dress right off of her shoulder, she was sure he was going to molest her. He didn't, and he even said he wasn't interested in her until she was older, but that fear never really went away._

 

_He measured her multiple times a day, every inch of her he could reach, and wrote those numbers down in a little notebook, muttering to himself all the while._

 

_He gave her a bundle of cushions and a blanket in an alcove of the bunker as a bed (like a dog), but at the very least he wasn't expecting her to sleep with him._

 

… _.._

 

“ _Don't just look at it. Eat it.”_

 

“ _I'm trying....”_

 

“ _What's that?”_

 

“ _I'm trying to eat it, I'm just not used to meat like this...”_

 

“ _Spent a good two days tracking that doe down. We don't waste food here.”_

 

“ _I could cook it a bit longer, I know how to use the gas stove...”_

 

“ _Blood's full of protein. You need the protein.”_

 

“ _My coach said I had plenty of muscle.”_

 

“ _There you go with that smart mouth...”_

 

“ _I wasn't trying to be smart....”_

 

“ _The numbers don't lie. Now eat your damn steak and get to bed.”_

 

… _.._

 

_Terror and boredom. That was what the world was reduced to._

 

_There was always that terror when he was skulking around the bunker, looking for something to be angry about. Even when they ate their (raw) meals together in silence, or watched old war movies on his fishbowl TV, or when he closed the curtain over her bed at night...._

 

_(and those few blessed moments when he let her use the shower, but stood outside watching the whole time)_

 

_...that he was going to snap. He was going to find something and he was going to kill her._

 

_The boredom filled in the days when he left the bunker. The ladder leading to the ceiling-door was at an awkward angle and even when she managed that maneuver she had seen him do, swinging from the top rung to the hinge, she couldn't push it open. She wasn't strong enough._

 

_So all there was left to do while she waited for him to return was walk circles around the bunker, scanning for another way out. Avoiding the meat locker (where she was fairly certain he stored some human body parts) and his bedcorner which stank of sickly-sweet musk and blood, tiptoeing around the kitchenette by his butchering tools and the primitive stove, ducking in and out of the water closet that housed the shower and the chemical toilet, there were no gaps to be found._

 

_He could be gone for two days, sometimes three. He had no books or magazines, the TV only worked when the generator was on and he switched it off as he left, sometimes it was so cold that all she could do was huddle under the blankets on her makeshift bed. On those days she grew so tired of that long stretch of nothing that she wished he would come home sooner._

 

_It was hard to concentrate on making escape plans when you were slowly losing your mind._

 

… _.._

 

“ _You've been walking around at night.”_

 

“ _I got up to use the bathroom.”_

 

“ _No, you didn't. I heard you skulking around near the door. Don't even bother lying about it.”_

 

“ _Fine. You want me to be honest?”_

 

“ _Go right ahead.”_

 

“ _It stinks in here, and I never get to go out. I was trying to get some fresh air, the smell gets worse at night.”_

 

“ _You got some guts, kid.”_

 

“ _I told you, I'm on my period. Smells get to me more this time of the month.”_

 

“ _All right, you want to go out? I'll take you out in the morning. But don't get any ideas, I'm putting you on a leash.”_

 

“ _Okay. Thanks.”_

 

… _.._

 

_In a strange way, he liked it when she got mouthy or smartass with him. He always got this little glint in his eye that said he was pretending to be angry but was actually enjoying her wit. His actual anger was unmistakable._

 

_Usually when he hit her, it came out of nowhere. He'd slap her face if she asked to shower or change what little clothes he let her wear. He pulled her hair to correct her posture during his measuring sessions, and he squeezed her flesh with calipers and his own fingers hard enough to leave her with aching bruises. Once he smacked her with the flat side of the butcher's knife he was using to carve up a deer, the pain of it was second to the annoyance of walking around with a huge bloodstain on her back._

 

_He grabbed her neck and dragged her back inside when she wandered too far for his liking (and she had been on the leash, so she couldn't have escaped), kicked her when she wasn't going to bed or eating fast enough, and there was a dreadful but thankfully once-off incident when she miscalculated how far she could go in being mouthy and he pointed the shotgun at her. He fired just an inch from her shoulder and again at her feet._

 

_The absolute worst, though, was when he took her teeth._

 

… _.._

 

“ _Are those all your adult teeth?”_

 

“ _Hm? Yeah, I think so...”_

 

“ _You think. Those two at the bottom, the ones that are criss-crossed....they're not baby teeth?”_

 

“ _No, I lost them in.....second grade, I think.”_

 

“ _Hm. They're crowded. Dentist didn't sort that out?”_

 

“ _I never saw a dentist.”_

 

“ _Figures. They knock your face out of kilter, it don't matter much now but as you get older it's gonna look worse.”_

 

“ _What are you doing?”_

 

“ _Gonna take 'em out...I'll be real quick, I promise.”_

 

“ _Why? Can't we go to a dentist? I won't say anything, I swear!”_

 

“ _Too risky, even if you did keep your big trap shut. Now open your mouth and I can get this over with.”_

 

“ _....can't I at least have something to numb the pain?”_

 

“ _What do you think I'd have for that around here?”_

 

“ _You have whiskey, I saw you bring it in. Two glasses and I won't complain._

 

“ _Goddamn, you really do have brass balls. Two glasses, if you can keep 'em down. If you puke on me, you''re going on that chopping block.”_

 

… _.._

 

_It hurt like hell, even with the whiskey rendering her numb and dizzy and somewhat giggly. He put her to bed and she stayed there for six days, her jaw swelled up like a balloon and she couldn't eat anything solid._

 

_The rare meat was even more nauseating now, when the memories of her mouth filling with blood and stinging alcohol were so fresh. She knew she was losing weight rapidly, but he didn't seem to notice even with all of his calculations. Now when he pinched her, his fingers found bone._

 

… _.._

 

“ _What's your family like?”_

 

“ _Why?”_

 

“ _Just curious. I know about your Dad...”_

 

“ _Not much to say. He wasn't much of a Dad.”_

 

“ _He didn't like you mouthing off to him all the time. Made a big deal about it.”_

 

“ _Maybe I wouldn't have been so mouthy if he had raised me better, so whose fault is that?”_

 

“ _That's fair. What about your mother?”_

 

“ _She drinks.”_

 

“ _....And?”_

 

“ _That's about it.”_

 

“ _I guess that's why she didn't notice what your Dad was up to with those pictures...”_

 

“ _I don't think she would have done anything even if she did know.”_

 

“ _Hm. Brothers and sisters?”_

 

“ _Sister. Olga.”_

 

“ _What's she like?”_

 

“ _Why? You planning on going after her next?”_

 

“ _Not at all. I want to get an idea of what you'll grow into.”_

 

“ _Then there's no point in telling you about Olga. We're exact opposites.”_

 

“ _How so?”_

 

“ _She's nice as pie to everyone, never mouths off , never causes trouble. And she's brittle.”_

 

“ _That's a complicated word for a little girl.”_

 

“ _I'm eleven, not five.”_

 

“ _Why brittle?”_

 

“ _She can't handle anything difficult. She always freaks out or pretends it's not happening. It's annoying.”_

 

“ _Hm.”_

 

“ _You would have killed her by now.”_

 

“ _Maybe.”_

 

… _.._

 

_She had advantages over his other victims. She was smart for her age, independent, not completely dead inside from trauma and not brain-addled from substance abuse. But mostly she was small enough to fit in tight spaces._

 

_Her salvation, as it turned out, was meant to be her prison._

 

_He'd gotten angry with her because his raw meat diet was making her lose weight he didn't want her to lose (and was making her toss and turn at night with stomach pains) and he figured the best way to make her more obedient was to chain her to the wall. Even then, he had to go the extra mile and get a dog crate to shut her in at night._

 

_At the very least, because she was now sleeping in a cold corner of the bunker, he gave her a filmy nightgown (far too big, belonged to one of his old victims) to wear over the underwear he allowed her. Boredom hit twice as hard in the cage, and the collar he had made her rubbed sores on her neck. Lying face down in the crate, running her fingers along the bars, she came across something she could use._

 

_A loose nail._

 

_It was small, but it was just about big enough to loosen the screws on her makeshift collar and slip it off. It was also small enough to hide in her hair, tied to a matted hank near her ear. Once he was gone on one of his trips, she could slip the collar, prise open the crate's door and see what the nail could do for her next._

 

_He always kept his blades and guns locked away when he left, but he left his measuring tape and notebook out. The pockets of rust in the door she had been staring at, wondering if they were big enough to let her slip out, but even if she could get up that far would she have the strength to pull herself through? The notebook had that answer. She got into the habit of handing him the measuring tape, just in case he ever thought to look for her fingerprints on it._

 

_The biggest patch of rust was 22 inches, and she was 25.6 inches at her widest._

 

_It was a long haul plan. She choked down as much of the nearly raw meat as she could, to build up her strength, and mouthed off to him just as much as ever so he wouldn't think anything was amiss. Whenever he left, she slipped her bonds and shimmied up the ladder, where she used the nail to widen the rust. She always finished before dawn, because he never came back before noon, and got as much sleep in between as she could._

 

_Her waist dropped to 24 inches, and the rust widened to 23._

 

_Despite herself, she was edgy. On the rare occasions that he let her outside for fresh air, she scanned the whole area to find a possible escape route. Between the swamp and the forest, it looked pretty daunting. And she knew that he was prone to leaving food around for local bears._

 

_She still hadn't found a route when she had finally gotten small enough to fit through the roof._

 

_(It was the same hole that Arnold would put his foot in five years later.)_

 

_She managed to grab onto the sides, though they cut into her hands, and pulled herself through inch by agonizing inch. The raw edges were sharp, and a protruding corner caught her just below her breastbone, pulling at her nightgown and tearing a long cut from her chest to her stomach._

 

_(Distantly, she worried about getting tetanus.)_

 

_She took two or three long gulps of fresh, free air before she stood, shakily, and tried to figure out where to go. That is where her luck ran out._

 

_She could hear him coming back. The climb out had taken much longer than she knew, and his familiar heavy boots were crashing through the undergrowth. She hurried off, wobbling madly like a newborn foal, in the opposite direction._

 

_He spotted her, she heard his muffled curse and a shell being loaded into the shotgun. She stopped just short of the cliff edge, staring down into the swamp. A dead end._

 

_Or was it...?_

 

_She couldn't know if she had actually jumped, or the shotgun blast knocked her over the edge. Either way the bullet caught her just as she moved, missing a fatal blow by millimetres and instead glancing off of her skull, rattling her brain and sending her plummeting into the swamp._

 

_He made his way to the cliff edge, peered over the side trying to spot the body. When he took his truck and went down to the swamp properly, he couldn't find any trace of her except for a few blood spatters on some leaves._

 

_For the first time in a long time, he felt afraid. He closed up his bunker, took nothing with him but his money and his gun, and fled to Mexico._

 

… _.._

 

_A separation had occurred following the gunshot, and the body formerly known as Helga Geraldine Pataki could not form a coherent thought beyond a primal urge for survival. She got up, and she walked away._

 

_She was lucky, because the unseasonable cold meant that the water moccasins in the swamp were sluggish and ignored her wading through the dank streams._

 

_She was lucky, because the mudtraps and boggy soil that should have sucked her in like a vacuum and exhausted her were barely disturbed by her light steps. Had she been even a single pound heavier, she would not have made it out._

 

_She was lucky that the bears had been well-fed by him, and were not interested in whatever was making those little sounds in the underbrush._

 

_She was lucky that despite the cold, the cloud cover and trees kept the climate somewhat warm as swamp turned to forest and though she could easily have died of exposure, she did not._

 

_The primal instinct that was left functioning guided her in the direction of running water, and after two solid days of walking she passed Tappenack Falls and came out onto the highway. She continued walking in no particular direction along the highway, vaguely inching towards the sun._

 

_That was where Ambrose Palmer, a retired logger on his way to pick up some belongings in Warleybridge, found her._

 

… _.._

 

There was a series of photos that gained some underground acclaim for being shot by photography amateurs that somehow captured something raw and extraordinary. One of these was a photo taken at St Jude's Hospital by a nineteen-year-old student hanging around in the emergency room. It was nicknamed the Backwoods Pieta.

 

In the photo, a tall man with an unironic cowboy hat, an impressive moustache and a sad, furrowed expression is carrying a child wrapped in a blanket. The child's face is serene, but her visage is cut in half by a mask of clotted blood stemming from her hairline and disappearing under the edge of the blanket. The other side of her face is unmarked, and her blonde hair is clean and scattered around her head like a halo. Her feet are dangling over the man's arms, they are covered in dried mud that, at first glance, makes it look like she is wearing boots.

 

A nurse has gone to meet them in the brightly-lit, white-walled hospital lobby. She is holding the girl's hand, stretched out between them like a bridge. Although she is most likely checking the girl's pulse, holding the girl's hand to her heart, it looks as though she is trying to comfort the girl.

 

This was the photo that consequently went viral when Helga Pataki was discovered to be the girl in the picture.

 

 

 


	19. Chapter 19

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Nineteen**

 

Once again I need to apologize for a long delay. I'm in the process of moving house and it's adding stress to my already busy schedule, but thankfully because the entire country is on red alert for a storm I get to take a break for a little while.

 

Also, a note: don't worry that this might be close to the end, I still have quite a lot of story to get through.

 

…..

 

The hell of it, according to Ambrose Palmer's internal thoughts, was that he wasn't even supposed to be in Warleybridge that day.

 

The police station had called him a month before to ask if he would mind coming down to pick up some of the belongings Ed had left behind after thirty-four years being their deputy clerk. He had assured them he would, but he put it off for as long as he could. It was a long drive, the weather was bad, he had to arrange for someone to look after his dog while he took the trip....

 

(mostly because he had just about finished clearing all of Ed's other stuff and life was getting back to normal again)

 

...but eventually he manned up and tackled the drive. There wasn't even that much to pick up, just his coffee mug, a small cactus, a framed picture of the two of them from that trip to Kansas City two years before Ed died, three notebooks and a whole bunch of pens. Barely worth the trip, but Ambrose was glad he took it.

 

On his way back, it was getting dark and he was zoning out, there were no other cars on the road. When the lights picked up on something he managed to swerve just in time to avoid hitting it.

 

At first, he thought it was a deer, a fawn maybe. A moose calf even. But as he focused, he realized it was a person. Not just a person, but a child. A child in _very_ bad shape. If it wasn't walking on the road, he would have thought it was dead.

 

He got out of his car and called.

 

“Hey....you okay?”

 

It was a stupid question, because the child was decidedly _not_ okay, but what else was he supposed to do? It was moot either way because the child apparently didn't hear him. Leaving his car, mumbling uncomfortably to himself, he ran after it.

 

_Her._

 

“Oh Christ....hey kid, can you hear me?”

 

She stopped in the road and stared at him, unblinking. She was skeletal, her face was covered in blood and the rest of her was covered in mud, insect bites and long thin scratches.

 

“Okay....okay....” Ambrose muttered, reaching gingerly for her shoulder in what he hoped was a comforting gesture. “We need to get you to a hospital.....you're gonna be okay, all right? Everything's going to be fine.”

 

It was the same kind of panicked babbling that Ed made fun of him for as he was nearing the end, but it was better than nothing. The girl seemed to agree, because the next moment her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell into a dead faint. Ambrose caught her just before she hit the asphalt.

 

“Shit,” he muttered, lifting her into his arms and rushing back to the car. “Oh lord....just hang on, sweetie, we'll getcha to the hospital, they'll fix you up good as new....”

 

He wrapped her up in an old blanket sitting in the boot of the car and drove with her stretched out on his lap, so he could make sure she was still breathing. Warleybridge had a small hospital-slash-respite home, he'd been there a lot with Ed.

 

He talked all the way back to Warleybridge, a non-stop outpouring of reassurances, promises and whatever the hell else popped into his head. If she heard any of it she gave no sign.

 

…..

 

She was checked against the Jane Doe registry, because of course she was. It was standard procedure.

 

The fact that she wasn't immediately identified as relatively-well-known-missing-child Helga Pataki was down to a perfect storm of circumstances that might not have happened had she ended up somewhere else.

 

*Firstly, the most recent pictures of Helga Pataki weren't really that recent. The one used on the national database was taken when she was eight, the other few that showed her between ten and eleven were deemed too blurry or too distracting to be useful.

 

*She had lost a lot of weight in captivity, and due to emaciation didn't look anything like her picture. Some of her hair had fallen out and her eye sockets were too bruised to take a good comparison photo. The doctors that treated her put her age at between seven and nine.

 

*The teeth that had been removed caused swelling in her jaw, knocking the entire lower half of her face out of kilter.

 

*Warleybridge was a rural area, and though they had internet it was slow and spotty. Loading pictures even in the sheriff's office or the hospital took longer than average, and after searching through pictures of little blonde girls all day with no clues people got fed up and left it.

 

*DNA taken from the girl didn't match anything in the system, and she could not be identified via dental records or any other medical procedures. As far as could be told, she hadn't had any medical care of any kind in her life.

 

*A backlog of work had been building up at the sheriff's office since the death of their clerk and they were having trouble finding a replacement. Therefore, they had been cutting corners on a lot of things, including calling around other sheriff's offices in nearby states.

 

*There were 'hillbilly' families in the area who lived off-grid and mostly under the radar of any kind of social services. Occasionally they popped up when someone was very ill but it was rare. Farming accidents were common with these people, as were hunting accidents, and it was thought likely that the girl had been left for dead after something like this.

 

So, for five years, even as reports and stories and podcasts and TV programs and forums and blogs all wondered what had become of her, Helga Pataki was lying in a hospital bed in Warleybridge, anonymous and mostly ignored.

 

…..

 

The name 'Serenity Doe' was a quip courtousy of a local who thought she was in a coma. Coma was not quite the right diagnosis, nor was she in a persistent vegetative state. What she had was closer to catatonia, she had moments of waking and even lucidity.

 

One month after she'd been brought in, she woke up but seemed to be incapable of speech and frustrated that she couldn't make herself understood. Paper and pens were given to her but when she tried to write it was an incomprehensible scribble. She was holding the pen correctly, though, so they knew she was educated at least a little. She was back sleeping within twelve hours.

 

The next time she woke, it was the middle of the night, and she tried to get out of bed but only succeeded in spraining her weakened ankles. Tube-feeding was helping her gain weight but it was slow, and she had mild atrophy from being in bed for so long.

 

Ambrose Palmer visited once a week, and when she woke for the third time she seemed to recognize him. She still couldn't write recognizably, but she managed to fold a piece of paper into an origami crane to give to him. The following week, he brought a guitar. She was back sleeping again, but he played for her and she could be observed smiling in her slumber.

 

Fourth and fifth times she woke, she managed to drag herself to the hospital kitchen, made herself a sandwich, ate it and then vomited because she couldn't handle solid food yet. A year had passed and she had ceased to be an interesting story to the town, but was still a patient the hospital staff were very protective of.

 

In her second year, she woke just three times. Once was just as Ambrose was arriving for his weekly visit, and it was thought that hearing him talk to the nurse in the hallway jolted her awake.

 

She woke more the third year, but for shorter lengths of time. Instead of twelve to twenty-four hours, she would have spells of lucidity for three hours or less. She did speak some recognizable words, mostly 'home' 'baseball' 'bridge' 'notebook', names of objects but never anything descriptive.

 

In year four she managed fragmented sentences, out of context and garbled. Talking about baseball games she had played when asked what she wanted to eat, complaining about the cold during a heat wave, telling Ambrose over and over (as he nodded along patiently) about some history report she had gotten a B- on. At the very least these 'conversations' ruled out the possibility that she was an off-grid hillbilly kid; she was educated and had a mild inner-city accent.

 

Year five was the most dramatic. She spent more time asleep than she had since the first year, but she could speak coherently and clearly when she was awake. She still couldn't explain who she was, where she had come from or what had happened to her, but she could answer simple questions, tell the doctors when something was hurting and hold a full back-and-forth exchange with Ambrose on his visits.

 

She seemed to be under the impression that she had only recently arrived at the hospital, and was convinced that she had just been somewhere else with someone whose name she couldn't quite recall. She had done his homework for him, apparently, and went on bike rides sitting in his basket. The nurses giggled, not unkindly, that she had an imaginary boyfriend.

 

By now she had gained much of the weight she had lost, though she was still thin and pale from living indoors and in bed for five years, and if they had checked they might have seen a resemblance to Helga Pataki. But by now all thoughts of trying to identify her had been put out of their mind, and they preferred to take care of the person they had now with the hopes that she would some day be able to live a normal life.

 

St Jude's Hospital and Convalescent home ticked along nice and quiet right up until a boy turned up claiming he knew the girl who had been sleeping for five years.

 

…..

 

In the motel, he squirmed and paced. Arnold wanted to get to Warleybridge as fast as possible. If there was even a small chance that Helga's body was there, dead or alive, he needed to see for himself. But just his luck that he would find this out just as Helga had gone into one of her long sleep cycles.

 

Should he message Phoebe? He wanted to. But if he turned up at this place and it turned out to be a false lead.....

 

But again, she had asked him not to keep things from her. He had to respect that.

 

 

 

**Phoebe, I need to tell you something.**

 

_**What's up? Did you find her?** _

 

**Yeah, I did. We're at a motel in Tappenack.**

**But I found something else out here.**

 

_**What is it?** _

 

**A missing girl was found on this**

**highway five years ago. She's been**

**in a coma in the local hospital ever since.**

 

 

_**Are you serious? Arnold,** _

_**if this is some sort of joke,** _

_**it's not funny.** _

 

 

**I wouldn't joke about something like this,**

**Phoebe. I'm going to check it out as**

**soon as Helga wakes up.**

 

_**Call me as soon as you get there.** _

 

 

The next bus to Warleybridgewas due in two hours. It was a half-hour walk down the road. He had already gathered his stuff, and there was nothing left to do but pace and wait.

 

He felt sick. He felt elated. He felt weak and energetic and exhausted all at once. He resisted the urge to try and shake Helga awake, trying to wake her up had never worked before.

 

Thankfully, just as he was starting to _really_ panic, she did wake up. She was rubbing her eyes as he marched over and pulled her out of bed.

 

“What the hell...?” she grumbled drowsily.

 

“We need to leave now,” he told her sharply. “I'll explain on the way.”

 

…..

 

When he did get to the hospital, he must have looked a state; unshaven, sweaty, bouncing on his heels. The nurse at the front desk eyed him warily.

 

“Can I help you?” she asked in a frosty tone.

 

“You have a patient here,” he babbled at her. “She's in a coma....Serenity Doe?”

 

“Mm,” the nurse said, lowering her eyes. “We have a strict D-notice on press here, even school newspapers. Your teacher should have told you that.”

 

“What? Oh, I'm not press,” he stuttered.

 

“No bloggers either,” the nurse said sweetly.

 

“No, no, that's not why I'm here....”

 

“Then you're a ghoul. We got a big D-notice on those two. You can take your 'fascination' somewhere else, kid. Maybe the asylum will let you in for a gawk.”

 

“No, you don't understand,” he growled, taking out his phone and dragging up an internet image of Helga. “I think I know who she is. She went missing five years ago, she hasn't been seen since.”

 

He pushed the phone in front of the nurses' face. She looked to it, then back at him.

 

“And who are you to this girl?” she asked.

 

“A friend,” he told her. “We grew up together....there was a bunch of new evidence found, she was taken by a serial killer who was holding her near Tappenack, but her body wasn't there. It's been all over the news, and the timelines match up. If it's her, I can identify her.”

 

The nurse stared hard at the photo. And then she stood up.

 

“I need to talk to the resident on call,” she told him. “Stay here. Don't talk to anyone.”

 

Helga had hung back behind him, and she stepped lightly to his side once the nurse was gone.

 

“What if it's not me in there?” she asked. She had been subdued on the bus, in contrast to how jumpy Arnold was.

 

“Then we look somewhere else. We won't stop,” he told her.

 

The nurse arrived back with a jovial-looking man who towered over Arnold.

 

“So you say you know our Serenity Doe, eh?” he said with an airy tone, though his eyes glittered with something hard, angry. “And what makes you different from the other nuts who turn up here with the same story?”

 

“Same story?”

 

“Yeah, you're not the first,” the doctor laughed, a little cruelly. “We get all kinds.”

 

“Uh, well, I'm not a nut,” Arnold tried to explain. “I came across a news article, the timelines match and so do the locations. I could identify her if I saw her.”

 

“Uh-huh,” the doctor sniffed. “And what makes you think that you could identify her when five years' worth of trained professionals couldn't?”

 

“Because I know her,” Arnold told him, a hard edge creeping into his own voice. “I'd know her anywhere.”

 

“Fine, fine,” the doctor shrugged. “Tell you what, if you can give me some information about your friend that matches what we have on file, I'll let you in to see her. Something nobody else would know.”

 

“Okay....” he agreed as the doctor opened his file. “Um, she fractured her eye socket when she was eleven. She said it was a baseball injury but really it was because she fell into a door.”

 

The doctor hummed noncommittally, wrote something down. Arnold wanted to tell him about her missing teeth, but that had happened after she was taken. The scars on her head and torso, too. What else was there?

 

“She's had no dental work done,” he told them. “That's why she has no dental records. She had the measles too, she was never vaccinated.”

The nurse pursed her lips and looked to the doctor, whose expression didn't change. Arnold wracked his brains for more.

 

“She has really distinctive eyebrows,” he said. “They were really big when she was a kid, not so much now I'd say. Her hands are callused because she was the batter in Little League. She took her bat everywhere.”

 

“This is all pretty basic stuff,” the doctor said. “Anything else?”

 

That panicky feeling was rising in him again. He had grown up with Helga for eleven years, mourned her for five, sheltered her for months....how could he know so little?

 

Just then, Helga whispered in his ear, and he repeated it.

 

“She has a burn mark on her knee shaped like the letter L, from when her dad threw a lit cigarette at her,” he recited. “A whole bunch of freckles on the back of her neck....if you join them up, it makes a really wonky-looking puppy....her left arm was broken three different times, first time was when she was four....oh, and a sickle-shaped scar on her back. She fell out of a window. There's a mole just beside it.”

 

By now, the nurse was ashen-faced, twisting her cardigan in her hands. The doctor's anger had left him, and now he was smiling wryly.

 

“Sounds like she was a rough-and-tumble kind of girl,” he said, scribbling on his notes.

 

“The roughest,” Arnold sighed with relief. “Half the kids at school were afraid of her.”

 

“All right, I'll let you in. You have ten minutes.”

 

…..

 

It was her.

 

She was smaller and paler and thinner than she had any right to be, and she was peacefully sleeping as lights blinked and tubes dripped and little monitors beeped and booped and did their jobs around her. The ghost of her looked more alive than she did, except for the gentle rise and fall of her chest as she took in air the ghost didn't need.

 

There was the star-shaped scar, but it had faded into white scar tissue and a tiny spot where hair would no longer grow. It was proof she was alive, and healing.

 

Arnold was rooted to the spot, afraid if he stepped forward something would change. Maybe this was a dream and he would wake up to find none of this had happened at all. But once again, the ghost Helga jolted him out of his stupor.

 

Her face was stoic as she drew up beside her living body, looking down on it as though she was observing from a great height. To Arnold's dismay, she was beginning to fade.

 

“This is why I came back,” she said. Her voice had an odd echo to it. “This is why I came to you. So you could find me.”

 

Arnold shook his head, not knowing how to react.

 

“I knew you wouldn't give up, and you didn't,” she said, her voice wavering and distorted in the air. “I was supposed to lead you here.”

 

He was beyond elated that he had found Helga, alive and well, and beyond horrified that the shade he had sheltered in his home, the spirit he had laughed with and comforted and talked long into the night with and _loved_ had fulfilled her purpose and now had no reason to be by his side anymore.

 

“Thank you,” she said as the first spectral tears started coursing down her rapidly fading face. “Thank you so much....”

 

“You don't have to go,” he said with a strangled gasp, and upon opening his mouth he tasted his own bitter tears. “We can go home, the doctors will take care of your body here. She might never wake up.”

 

“I do have to go,” she said, smiling as she held her body's hand. “We were separated from each other, I needed your help to bring us back together. Everything's going to be fine.”

 

He crossed the room in three steps, and just about managed to gather her into his arms and kiss her where the star cut through her hair before she faded away entirely and, he knew, for good.

 

He was properly sobbing when he sat in the chair across from Helga's body; it felt like something had been torn out of him. He took her hand, the one the ghost had been holding before she faded, and brought it to his cheek.

 

“I'm sorry,” he gasped. “I'm so sorry I took so long to find you.”

 

The body's eyes fluttered open and the head turned to look at him. She frowned a little at him, and he gave her a watery smile back.

 

“Hey,” he managed to say with a graceless croak. “Welcome back.”

 

Her mouth opened, just a little, but no sound came out. She was trying to say something. He came in closer to hear, but nothing. He watched her mouth the words before he could understand what she was trying to say.

 

_Football Head._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	20. Chapter 20

 

**Chapter Twenty**

 

 

…..

 

The hospital let him stay there, even after his ten minutes with Helga was up. They found an unused cot for him in the break room and after calling his Grandpa to explain where he was and why, he settled down to an uneasy sleep.

 

The spirit Helga being gone left a hole, as he feared it would. He was overjoyed that the real one had turned out to be alive, but there was a lot of uncertainty there and he had gotten so used to the spirit it was hard to imagine what he was going to do without her. Unconsciously, he'd been planning his life around her presence.

 

Phoebe's parents were driving her down the next day, and Officer Plaskett was on his way too. The next morning the head doctor brought Arnold into his office.

 

“We've pretty much confirmed that she is who you say she is,” he began flippantly, nudging a cup of coffee in Arnold's general direction. “She gave us her name, it's the first time she's been able to tell us anything useful. She's more lucid in general, actually.”

 

“That's good, right?” Arnold asked, sipping the offered coffee.

 

“It's unexpected,” the doctor told him. “Catatonia is still a bit of a medical mystery. The brain is a complex organ, it can recover from some horrendous trauma but it throws out curve balls. The only person she's ever reacted to is Mr Palmer....”

 

“Who?”

 

“Ambrose Palmer,” the doctor shrugged, rifling through his notes. “The man who found her? We figured she must have known him, although he said he'd never met her before.”

 

“I don't remember any Palmer,” Arnold said.

 

“Good man. He's been paying her hospital bills,” the doctor explained. “And he visits once a week. That may cause complications with the family, though...”

 

Arnold winced, and the doctor caught it.

 

“Something wrong, son?”

 

“I.....I think you need to discuss the family with Officer Plaskett,” he stammered. The thought of bringing Bob Pataki back into Helga's life made his stomach churn.

 

“The plot thickens,” the doctor said, leaning back in his chair. “All right. You can see her for an hour. Keep the talking to simple subjects. Nothing intense. We don't want to overload her. If she seems tired or distressed, get the nurse. And this friend of hers....”

 

“Phoebe.”

 

“Right, Phoebe. She needs to do the same. No big shows of emotion. Catatonia works both ways, she could easily slide back in if we don't proceed with caution. Understand?”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

…..

 

Her eyes were frosty, glazed. Whether it was medication or just confusion, Arnold couldn't tell.

 

“What did you say your name was?” she asked. Her voice was husky from disuse, and she slurred her words a little.

 

“I didn't,” he said. “It's Arnold. Arnold Shortman.”

 

“Why did I call you Football Head?”

 

“It's what you used to call me back in elementary school,” he told her with a soft laugh. “I sort of grew out of it since.”

 

“That's kind of mean,” she said, frowning.

 

“No, it was kind of affectionate when you did it,” he said. “If you were really mad at me you'd use my actual name so I'd know I was in trouble.”

 

She sighed a bit, stifled a yawn. The nasogastric tube was plainly irritating her, she tugged at it a little every now and then.

 

“Everything's fuzzy,” she said with a hint of irritation. “I know I know you, I just can't really remember how.”

 

“That's okay,” he assured her. “The doctor said it'll come back slowly. Hey, you know this happened before.”

 

“It did?”

 

“Yeah, back in the 4th grade, kind of,” he explained. “I accidentally hit you in the head with a baseball, you lost your memory for two full days.”

 

“Seriously?” she asked, though she was smiling now, at least.

 

“Yeah, seriously. I had to look after you for a little while, 'cos it was my fault. You must have called me every name beginning with A except Arnold.”

 

She laughed, a little hoarsely.

 

“What grade are we in now?” she asked when she had finished laughing, and his stomach dropped.

 

_How much can I tell her?_

 

“Uh, well, I'm in the 10th grade.”

 

“But I'm not?”

 

He looked away, frantically trying to think of something but not coming up with anything. But she sighed again and tugged on her tube.

 

“It's okay, I know you're not supposed to tell me anything serious,” she said. “Doctors want to keep me in the dark, it's probably a good thing.”

 

Even drugged up and woken from a five-year-slumber, she was as sharp as ever. It made Arnold feel a little better since losing the spirit Helga.

 

“Phoebe should be here soon, she can fill you in on some of the things you missed out on,” he said.

 

“Who's Phoebe?”

 

“Your best friend.”

 

“I have a best friend?” she asked, delighted.

 

“Yeah, you guys did pretty much everything together,” Arnold laughed, delighted for her. “Her parents are driving her down, they should be here soon. Oh, and the police officer from our home town is probably going to want to talk to you.”

 

“Okay, so you're here and Phoebe and this police guy are coming down,” she began, tapping at the tube in her nose again. “Where are my family though? Or is that something you're not supposed to talk about?”

 

He bit his lip nervously, and she sighed heavily.

 

“Right, long story. Never mind then.”

 

“I just don't know that much about it,” he offered. “As far as I know, they live really far away. They might have been hard to get in touch with. I know your sister will probably be on her way as soon as she can....”

 

“Sister? What's her name?”

 

“Olga.”

 

“Hm. Doesn't ring any bells.”

 

Just then, Phoebe finally arrived. Although Arnold knew she'd been given the same 'keep it simple, no big show of emotion' pep talk he'd been given, she welled up as soon as she saw Helga sitting up in bed, alive and mostly well.

 

“Oh my God,” she gasped, and immediately started sobbing. Arnold looked to Helga with alarm. If this sent her backsliding....

 

“Hey Pheebs!” she said instead, beckoning her in for a hug.

 

…..

 

Officer Plaskett arrived within an hour, and as he had his own talk with Helga Arnold went to the hospital cafeteria to eat a tasteless sandwich and call his Grandpa again.

 

“I know you've been worried about me lately,” he told him, although he would much rather be having this talk in person, but he heard the strain in Phil's voice over the phone. “But it's all going to be fine now. We can go back to normal.”

 

“Normal?” Phil's voice cracked on the word. “There's no normal, Arnold. Your Grandma's turned a corner but she's not going to be able to work the same way she used to. I need as much help as I can get back here and if what you're telling me about that Pataki girl is true....”

 

“It's true, she's right here!”

 

“...it's only going to get more complicated. The gutter press are going to be crawling all over Hillwood until the next big story happens, and if you're over there all the time how am I supposed to take care of the boarders by myself?”

 

“I don't know,” Arnold said helplessly, because he really didn't. “We'll figure something out, I'll be home soon....but this is something I need to be a part of, okay? I've never asked you for much, but I'm asking you to let me have this. Please.”

 

Phil muttered something and hung up. Arnold felt a stab of anger towards him. True, Phil had always done his best raising him along with Gertie, but Arnold had always known he'd been forced to grow up a lot faster than most of his peers, and he'd sacrificed a good chunk of his life to the boarding house. He'd never complained about it, even when his friends all moved on with their lives without him. Why couldn't he have just this one thing?

 

He was tearing what was left of his sandwich into little pieces when Officer Plaskett threw himself down on the seat across from him.

 

“So that psychic's got a real gift, huh?” he began.

 

“She sure does,” Arnold agreed.

 

“It's powerful. Especially since when I talked to her she had no idea who you or Phoebe were.”

 

“It comes and goes, I guess,” Arnold retorted.

 

“I don't care anymore,” Plaskett shrugged. “Keep your secrets. Helga is the best chance for securing a conviction against Curtis Waring, once she gets her memory back. And she can probably tell me how you found her.”

 

“I doubt it.”

 

“This is going to blow up big time, Arnold,” Plaskett warned, dumping three sugar packets into his coffee at once. “Once the media gets a hold of it.....you're going to be grilled by those vultures, and you need to be ready. People are going to see that you found both the crime scene and the missing girl and wonder if you didn't have something to do with it.”

 

“I can only tell the truth,” Arnold shrugged.

 

“The truth is subjective,” Plaskett responded, swigging his coffee with a grimace. “People will believe what they want.”

 

“I'd worry more what they're going to say when some of the other details of the case get out,” Arnold sighed, exhausted. “Like what her Dad was doing.”

 

“We don't have to release that information, Bob Pataki is serving a custodial sentence in New Mexico. He's up for parole next year, but that's next year's problem.”

 

“What about Helga's Mom? She might leak something....”

 

“Miriam Pataki's been dead for two years. Liver failure.”

 

He should really have seen that one coming.

 

“We're trying to get in touch with Olga Pataki,” Plaskett said. “She's changed her name so it's taking longer than it should. Problem then is that Helga's technically a ward of the state, if her sister isn't willing to take responsibility for her.”

 

Arnold recalled the very few times spirit Helga mentioned Olga, how she thought of her as mentally fragile and minutes from a nervous breakdown at all times. It was very unlikely that Olga would even be capable of looking after someone other than herself.

 

“What happens if she's a ward of the state?” he asked, feeling the blood drain from his face.

 

“Best case scenario, someone adopts her and gets her through rehabilitation, physio and the legal mess this is going to be,” Plaskett explained with a tired shrug. “Worst case is she gets the bare minimum help from the state, group home until she's eighteen and then she's on her own. Worst case probably won't happen, she's already got one stranger paying her hospital bills and people tend to donate when these things break. She'll be able to afford decent care.”

 

Arnold's mind was already ticking in that direction. She could move into one of the spare boarding rooms, one on the ground floor. The donations would cover her rent and Arnold could look after her. She'd be somewhere familiar and close to anything that she needed....

 

But even as he worked out the details, he knew it wouldn't happen. Phil would never agree to it. There was no way to get a wheelchair over the stoop and it would be a long time before Helga would be strong enough to bear weight on her legs, let alone climb stairs. The boarding house was loud and dilapidated, cold in winter and overheated in summer and no place for a convalescent.

 

“Don't worry, son,” Plaskett said with a wry smile. “We'll make sure she's well taken care of, one way or the other.”

 

It didn't make him feel better.

 

…..

 

Officer Plaskett had offered to drive him home, and was waiting in the lobby for Arnold to say goodbye to Helga. But as they'd been talking, Ambrose Palmer had arrived. He hadn't been due for a visit for another three days, but the hospital had called him to let him know Helga was awake and lucid.

 

Arnold lingered in the hall, peering through the crack in the door and listening in.

 

Ambrose could have fit the dictionary definition of a retired cowboy. Blue jeans, leather jacket, unironic stetson and impressive moustache along with the kind of body language and demeanor one would associate with a person who was good with animals. And apparently, injured young girls.

 

“I don't know how I'm going to pay you back,” Helga was saying, Arnold saw her twisting her blanket nervously. “The officer said people usually donate money for this kind of thing but if that doesn't happen....”

 

“Don't worry about paying me back,” Ambrose told her with a chuckle. “I got into this thinking you'd be Sleeping Beauty forever. 'sides, that money wasn't going nowhere special.”

 

“Are you sure?” she said with a frown, pushing at her nasogastric tube. “It seems like a lot....”

 

“You got one job, and that's getting better,” he told her mock-sternly. “You let us adults worry about the rest. If you really want, you can make me one of them fancy paper birds. I want a matching set.”

 

“I don't even remember doing that,” she laughed softly. “You really bought me fancy paper?”

 

“Super fancy. Had to get it online and everything,” he said, tipping his hat ever so slightly. “Amazon dot com. Ed been trying to get me on Amazon for years, and I never went near it.”

 

“I'm honored. I'll make you a whole flock, if Phoebe can show me how again.”

 

“That'd be swell.”

 

“Uh, hey,” Arnold finally felt comfortable interrupting. “I have to head back now, I just came to say goodbye.”

 

Helga smiled, but Arnold could detect a little panic in her eyes.

 

“Will you be coming back?” she asked.

 

“Of course,” Arnold promised. “As soon as I can. And as often.”

 

He hugged her, and by the way she was clinging on he could tell she was just as reluctant to let him go as he was to leave.

 

“See you later then, Football Head,” she said when she let go.

 

“That's a bit mean,” Ambrose gently admonished.

 

“Apparently that's our thing,” Helga shrugged.

 

“Yeah, it really is,” Arnold laughed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	21. Chapter 21

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Twenty-One**

 

… **..**

 

 

 

…..

 

Arnold juggled his boarding house duties and spending time at the hospital like he had never juggled before. His grades were slipping again, but his Grandpa was mollified for the moment. The boarders got their meals, the fixtures were repaired or at least repaired enough to keep them ticking until they inevitably broke down again.

 

Gertie was home now, and it was clear she wasn't able for her regular tasks anymore. She had picked up an infection during her stay at the hospital and she was noticeably frail, and although she could still clean and cook to an extent she tired so easily that someone else had to take over whatever she had started. She seemed slower mentally too, and she slept a lot.

 

They were lucky that most of the boarders had been there long enough that they had a good relationship with Phil and Gertie, but even they were getting to the end of their patience with how slow everything had become. They sometimes murmured about paying lower rent, and Phil refused to discuss the matter with them because lowering the rent would mean the entire boarding house going under.

 

Still, the boarding house was hardly a concern for Arnold; he was reading up about catatonia, brain injury and memory loss. Medical journals were incomprehensible but he had found some decent sources in layman's terms that described the recovery period for people who had experienced these things.

 

What he learned, mostly, is that brain-injured patients were unpredictable. Helga's doctor had mentioned that she had developed traumatic encephalopathy as a result of being shot in the head and that it would take a long time to figure out exactly how much damage had been done, but he told Arnold to watch out for signs of aggression, loss of focus and sudden clumsiness.

 

So far, she had been doing well. She was attending physiotherapy to get her walking again, she was always happy to see visitors and she was doing everything she was supposed to. Her memory was coming back in little trickles. She seemed perfectly okay, really. The only symptom of note was that she had some extreme food aversions; she wouldn't eat any kind of meat, or food that was mixed up. Every ingredient had to be separate and eaten slowly, one by one. When you asked her, she couldn't say why, but putting a pork chop or a bowl of curry in front of her induced wincing at the very least and vomiting at most.

 

It was only a matter of time. Both Arnold and Phoebe were dreading the day she'd remember what her father had done to her, and what had followed.

 

…..

 

**Arnold, I just got in and she's not here.**

**The doctor said she remembered**

**something but wouldn't talk about it.**

**I don't know what to do.**

 

 

**Hang tight, I'll be**

**there soon. I'm on the bus.**

 

 

**Jesus Christ, just when I thought**

**it was all going well! What are we**

**going to do?**

 

 

**Don't panic, she can't**

**have gone far. She**

**can't walk.**

 

 

**I'm serious, Arnold! Goddammit, I**

**thought the nurses were keeping**

**an eye on her.**

 

 

When he arrived, he exchanged two words with Phoebe before she was rushing to the nurse's station. She was white as a sheet, trembling. Whatever had happened, it was pretty bad. He figured it was best to go to Helga's room, maybe it would give an indication of where she had gone.

 

And when he got there, he spotted what Phoebe had clearly missed in her panic; Helga's IV pole was still there, just dragged over to one side.

 

“Helga? Are you in here?” he asked.

 

There was a quiet answering cough from under the bed.

 

He crouched down low on the floor. He couldn't see her at first, the hospital bed's crank and gears blocked his vision, but when he looked a little closer he could just about spot her foot at the far side, near the wall.

 

“What are you doing down there? _How_ did you get down there?”

 

“With a lot of effort, duh,” she said wearily.

 

He smiled, despite himself. That snippy wit of hers was making its way back, slowly and steadily.

 

“Phoebe texted me in a panic,” he told her.

 

“Well, I tried to tell her I was down here but she ran off before I could. She knows I can't walk, right?”

 

“That's what I said.”

 

The IV pole clattered off the side of the bed as Helga turned towards him, just enough so he could see her face.

 

“Do you want to tell me what happened, or would you rather not?”

 

She sighed, fidgeted, curled in on herself tighter.

 

“I remembered some stuff. It was pretty bad,” she said, and he got the sense that was all she wanted to say about it.

 

“Are you hiding from it?”

 

“I don't know, going under the bed just seemed like a good idea.”

 

It was risky to bring it up, it could just have easily been her experience at the hands of Waring that she remembered, but....

 

“Didn't the officer tell you that your Dad is in jail? He can't hurt you. Even if he gets out, he won't be able to get to you.”

 

She stiffened, and in the dark her eyes were wide, horrified.

 

“You know?”

 

Arnold's stomach dropped. In his eagerness to reassure her, he'd just let her know that someone she knew had seen those pictures.

 

“Yeah, I....I gave the evidence to the police...” he stammered, mentally kicking himself for being so stupid. “I didn't really look, I just saw enough to know what he was doing....”

 

“Who else has seen them?” Helga said, her voice thick with unshed tears.

 

“Just me and Officer Plaskett. Phoebe knows but she hasn't seen anything.”

 

He gulped; there was no point in keeping all the details from her now.

 

“Rhonda saw one, it was apparently one of the more normal ones. She just thought it was a regular picture.”

 

“Rhonda Wellington-something? Holy shit,” she laughed, half-crying. “Of all people....”

 

“She can't say anything though,” Arnold tried to reassure her. “She sent some pictures out herself apparently.... and she doesn't really talk to anyone these days anyway.....”

 

She said nothing, but he could hear her sniffling. Her back was turned to him, she was pressed up against the wall as close as she could get.

 

This was exactly what the doctor had wanted to avoid. If she was ever in danger of slipping back into catatonia, it was now.

 

“I'm sorry,” he said, helplessly, on the verge of panicking. “I'm....he's a monster. But he'll never be able to hurt you again.”

 

_That's not true. He's up for parole next year._

 

“Listen...” he kept going, knowing he was probably just making things worse, but what else could he do? “Most people would have just given up if they'd been through what you've been through. You never gave up, you kept going even when it nearly killed you.”

 

She was still silent, but her sniffles had died down a little.

 

“They convicted him after you went missing, with whatever evidence they had, but they never got to hear your story. You can change that now. You can put him away for longer.”

 

“I can't even get out of this bed without help,” she said. She sounded worn out, already on the verge of sleep.

 

“Well, yeah,” he nodded. “But you have help. You have me, and Phoebe...and that Ambrose guy, I think he'd do anything for you. You have Officer Plaskett....hell, that's just now, wait until people in Hillwood find out you're alive!”

 

The D-notice at the hospital was being upheld until the doctors thought Helga was strong enough to face media attention. What little had been told to the press was that a patient had woken up from a long sleep, and it was going relatively unnoticed.

 

“Your father ruined your life,” he said. “We're going to give it back to you, one way or the other. People will be falling over themselves to give you back your life.”

 

The silence stretched between them. Had she gone back to sleep? Arnold didn't think he could bear it if she had.

 

“Arnold?”

 

He was so relieved to hear her speak he nearly burst into tears himself.

 

“I'm kind of stuck here,” she said. “Could you help me out?”

 

He half-laughed, half-sobbed. He hurriedly wiped his eyes and got up.

 

“Sure.”

 

He pulled her out as gently as he could by her ankles, picked her up and put her back in bed. She was far too easy to carry, her spirit had had more weight in her. Even so, she didn't look as gaunt as she had when he first saw her in the hospital.

 

“Oh, I forgot,” he said, grabbing the bag he had brought with him. “I have something for you.”

 

Her face had lost that stricken look, he was endlessly thankful for that. She even managed to smile when she opened the bag.

 

“Clothes? How do you know if they'll fit?”

 

They were the clothes he'd bought for her ghost, and they had fit her reasonably well, but they'd probably be too big on Helga right now.

 

“The saleslady said they're mostly stretch to fit,” he told her with a shrug. “I figured you'd be sick of wearing hospital clothes by now.”

 

“You're a good guy,” she sighed, looking on the verge of tears again. “I'm not sure I deserve you.”

 

“Of course you do,” he replied. “You deserve as much as I can give you.”

 

She really did cry then, but she hid it by clapping her hands over her eyes, even though they were still holding one of the sweaters he'd brought for her.

 

“What did you do?”

 

Phoebe was standing in the doorway, shooting an accusatory glare at Arnold. He could only shrug in response.

 

…..

 

“Do you think she'll remember what happened when she was living in my house?”

 

Phoebe glanced up at him and dropped her sandwich.

 

“Why would she?” she replied.

 

“If she remembers everything else....her doctor says there's not many significant gaps except some dates, place names and people,” Arnold said. “She didn't react to the clothes much, but maybe it needs a different trigger.”

 

_She could remember what happened at the pier._

 

He was hoping against hope that she would remember that. She had kissed him back, he knew that for certain. She had pushed him away so he wouldn't love a ghost, but she wasn't a ghost anymore. Nothing was standing in their way now....

 

“I've been thinking about that, actually,” Phoebe began, pushing her smoothie around on her lunch tray. “Do you know what a _folie á deux_ is?”

 

“Sounds familiar but no, not really,” Arnold answered.

 

“It means the madness of two,” she continued. “It's what they call it when two people share a delusion or a psychosis. I think maybe that's what we had.”

 

“What? Phoebe, we're not insane....”

 

“It happens to sane people, Arnold,” she said, shaking her head. “Sometimes it's due to stress....I mean, we were both finding it hard to let go of her, and when I first 'saw' her I was in the middle of a freakin' breakdown...”

 

“Phoebe, she wrote you notes,” Arnold insisted. “She used the shower. She lead us right to the guy that took her for fuck's sake!”

 

“Says who?” Phoebe shrugged, her eyes lowered down at the table. “Maybe all that was just our perception. Weirder things have happened. But both you and I know that there's no such thing as ghosts, and even if there was why would we see the ghost of someone who was alive the whole time?”

 

He sat back, gobsmacked. It did make sense, but....

 

“Either way, we shouldn't bring it up with her,” Phoebe said, picking up her tray with her half-eaten lunch on it. “She's got enough crap to deal with as it is.”

 

Lunch period wasn't over yet, but evidently Phoebe was done talking. Arnold lingered at the empty table, watched her leave. People were trickling back in the direction of their next classes. Arnold picked up his milk and took a big gulp, and nearly spat it out again when someone took up Phoebe's seat across from him.

 

“Hey Arnold!” Gerald said.

 

Arnold swallowed with difficulty. He and Gerald hadn't exchanged so much as a greeting in years.

 

“What do you want?” he said, and it came out a little harsher than he meant it to.

 

“Nothing, I just wanted to see what's going on with you,” Gerald shrugged and smiled his achingly familiar carefree smile.

 

“Gerald, you haven't spoken to me since middle school. What do you really want?”

 

The smile dropped, Gerald leaned back and crossed his arms.

 

“Fine,” he snarled. “I want to know what's going on with you and Phoebe.”

 

“What?” Arnold snorted. “Why do you care?”

 

“I have my reasons,” Gerald replied. “She's looking better these days, you got anything to do with that?”

 

“God, you are such an asshole,” Arnold laughed in his face. “You gave her the cold shoulder when her best friend went missing and now that she's finally doing better you're suddenly interested?”

 

“Look, I know I'm an asshole, okay? I don't need you to tell me that,” Gerald snarled. “I was a dumb fucking kid and I didn't know what to do, sue me. If you were in my shoes you wouldn't have done much better....”

 

“Yes, I would have.”

 

“Fine, you would have done better. Because you're so fucking perfect, you can solve everyone's problems. I didn't come over here to convince you I'm a good guy, okay?”

 

“Why did you come over here then?”

 

All of Gerald's anger seemed to drain out of him then, and he was slouching, awkward. He rubbed the back of his neck and met Arnold's eyes with difficulty.

 

“I want to know that she's happy,” he said. “Is she happy?”

 

“Uh...yeah, I guess,” Arnold said, puzzled.

 

“You guess?”

 

“She's happy as anyone could be, in these circumstances.”

 

“Right. Well, that's all I wanted to know,” said Gerald, rising to his feet. “This is going to sound weird coming from me, but....you make sure you treat her right, okay? Don't do what I did.”

 

He didn't even wait for a reply, just strode off back to his group of friends. Arnold, baffled, went back to drinking his milk.

 

He only realized Gerald though he and Phoebe were dating hours later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	22. Chapter 22

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Twenty Two**

 

 

…..

 

The first Arnold knew of the story finally breaking was scrolling through clickbait websites absently while downing his breakfast, when the words **SHOT IN THE HEAD AS SHE TRIED TO ESCAPE** screamed across the screen of his phone. He nearly dropped it in his oatmeal.

 

_Wasn't Plaskett supposed to warn me about this?_

 

As soon as he recovered (somewhat), he rang Phoebe.

 

“I know, I saw it an hour ago,” she told him.

 

“Why didn't you call me?” Arnold growled, rooting around for his shoes.

 

“It was six am, I didn't think your grandparents would appreciate me waking up the entire house.”

 

“A text, then. I had to read it on fucking Pebbledash, of all places!”

 

“All right, I'm sorry,” she admitted. “I'm on my way to the hospital now, hopefully there won't be too many journos there yet. Can you field any questions at school?”

 

“You think I'm going to school?” Arnold scoffed, finding his missing shoes and stuffing his feet into them as fast as possible. “I'm getting the next bus out.”

 

“No, don't,” she said. “Call Plaskett, he'll give you a lift. He hasn't left yet but he said he was going in the next hour.”

 

“You called him but not me?”

 

“He called me. Stop sulking.”

 

…..

 

“There was a leak,” Plaskett admitted, grumbling into his coffee as he drove. “Some orderly at the hospital overheard the doctors talking, the press were on it like flies on shit.”

 

“How bad is it?” Arnold asked, bracing himself.

 

“Well, if she was still catatonic it would be a disaster,” Plaskett mused. “And if she hadn't made so much progress....she might even be up for a press conference. What do you think?”

 

“Why are you asking me? Isn't this your specialty?”

 

“You know her better than I do,” Plaskett shrugged. “She seems to have most of her memory back, she's in decent physical health, and her doctors haven't reported any anomalies. It's hard to know unless someone who knows her well can say she's pretty much back to normal.”

 

_What is normal, exactly?_

 

“I can't really say,” Arnold said, after thinking it over. “I think the only person who knows if she can get through a press conference is Helga herself. I mean, she seems fine but she was always keeping things bottled up...”

 

“That's what I was worried about,” Plaskett sighed. “Well, we'll just have to see....Christ, it's even worse than I thought. Bunch of vultures...”

 

They pulled into the hospital parking area with great difficulty, because the hospital grounds were swarming with people. Photographers, newscasters speaking to the camera with the hospital in the background, news vans with equipment shifted from space to space.

 

“Keep your head down and don't say anything to them,” Plaskett warned as they prepared to get out of the car. “Do you have I.D?”

 

“Uh, I have my student card,” Arnold answered.

 

“That'll do. If this place is smart, they'll have gotten in extra security.”

 

…..

 

Helga was in physiotherapy, and the nurse brought Arnold down there while Plaskett discussed the swarming press agents with the doctors.

 

She was wearing one of the tank tops he'd brought for her, and hospital-issue trousers. It was painful to see just how thin she was, how what little muscle she had strained as she pulled herself up on the bars to a standing position. Her jaw was clenched but she didn't make a sound.

 

“Don't push it,” the therapist warned. “Your body knows what it can do. Relax and breathe.”

 

With effort, Helga lowered herself back down into the wheelchair. She massaged her temple, just under the spot the bullet had caught.

 

“We'll call it a day here,” the therapist said, wheeling the chair out of the bars. “Your friend is here, he can take you back to your room.”

 

Helga looked up sharply, noticing Arnold for the first time.

 

“You caught me at a bad time,” she quipped, smoothing down her hair.

 

“Looked like you were doing pretty good to me,” Arnold shrugged.

 

Helga snorted, fidgeted in her chair.

 

“I'm all sweaty,” she said. “All this for two measly steps. Can you believe I used to play baseball?”

 

He took the handles of the wheelchair and wheeled her through the corridors, watching at the windows for any sign of a camera shutter.

 

“Considering you couldn't move at all for five years, I'd say two steps is good progress,” he said. “I don't think anyone would blame you if you stayed in bed forever after what you've been through.”

 

“No thank you,” she shuddered. “The sooner I can walk the sooner I can walk out of here.”

 

An icy dread trickled through Arnold's being, hearing her say that. Walk out of there to go...where exactly? Her mother was dead, her father was in jail, her sister was who knows where, and she was only sixteen. There were only so many options. At least while she was in the hospital, Arnold was sure she would be safe.

 

Her room was, thankfully, in the quiet wing of the hospital, away from the bubble of people near the entrance. He lifted her out of the chair and into her bed, just as Plaskett and Phoebe came in.

 

“Right, I've talked with both of your friends,” Plaskett began, sitting in the chair nearest the bed, looking Helga square in the eye. “They seem to think you're holding up okay, mentally at least. How do you feel?”

 

“Okay, I guess,” Helga shrugged.

 

“We can arrange a press conference for two hour's time,” he continued. “It'll give the vultures what they want, for now anyway, and they might get lost. But we'll only go forward if you want to, and we can bring the whole thing to a halt if you feel uncomfortable.”

 

Helga swallowed hard, clearly nervous, but she nodded.

 

“We can't talk in detail about what happened to you,” Plaskett warned. “No names...”

 

“I never knew his name anyway,” she said.

 

“That's a good thing, I guess. You can talk about your injuries, but no talking about who inflicted them. Say 'I was shot with a 12-gauge' rather than 'he shot me with a 12-gauge.”

 

“I don't know what kind of gun it was,” she said.

 

“Great,” Plaskett nodded. “Keep it vague. If any of the journos gets out of line, I'll shut them down. Got it?”

 

“I think so.”

 

“All right, I'll go make the arrangements. You got something to wear that's not scrubs?”

“Yes, Arnold brought me some clothes.”

 

“Good. Find something kind of goody-two-shoes to wear, if you can. That always plays well in the papers.”

 

With that, he was gone. Phoebe and Arnold exchanged worried glances; Helga sounded like she was on board, but she was visibly nervous, white and gently trembling.

 

“You don't have to do this,” Phoebe said. “You don't owe anyone answers.”

 

“No, I'd be better off getting it over with,” Helga sighed. “I need a shower. Could you call the nurse?”

 

 

…..

 

Helga Pataki was all anyone could talk about, in the aftermath.

 

She'd worn that pink blouse with the little cat heads on it with a mint-green skirt and flat ballet pumps. Phoebe had braided her hair to hang over one shoulder. It all had the effect of making her look like a strong gust of wind would blow her away.

 

All the same, she answered the difficult questions without flinching. She described how she had lived on raw meat, been chained to the wall and kept in a dog crate for weeks. When asked what she'd been doing in the mountains when she was taken, she answered plainly that she had a turbulent home life and the mountains was where she hid out sometimes.

 

She was eloquent, and spoke with clear intelligence, and the reporters lapped it up. They couldn't have asked for a more perfect victim.

 

At school, suddenly everyone wanted to talk to Arnold and Phoebe. Phoebe responded by skipping school; she was bright enough to miss a few days. Arnold had to put up with it all alone. It was bad enough when it was total strangers wanting to probe him for information, but most of his old friends remembered that he existed for just long enough to grill him a little extra.

 

“This is what you and Phoebe have been sitting on?” Rhonda said, shoving her phone in his face. “She's been alive this whole time?”

 

“We haven't been sitting on it,” Arnold grumbled, closing his locker and trying to walk away from her.

 

Her sandals clacked loudly on the linoleum; she was following him.

 

“Bullshit you haven't,” she snarled, right in his ear. “What are the odds I hear you and four-eyes talking about Helga and ...boom!....suddenly she's alive?”

 

“I know you probably won't believe this, Rhonda, but it was a huge coincidence,” Arnold sighed.

 

“You're right, I don't believe you,” she replied. “Four-eyes owes me an apology.”

 

“Well, if Phoebe owes you an apology then you owe Helga an even bigger one,” he said, turning to face her. “I can give you the hospital address, you can visit her yourself.”

 

Rhonda's mouth opened and closed, until she folded her arms protectively around herself, staring at the floor.

 

“Right, didn't think so,” Arnold quipped, pushing past her.

 

At home, his inbox was blowing up. People he had gotten to know on true crime forums, people who knew his connection to the case, were messaging him at a rate of three per minute. He had emails from multiple press agents. Missed calls from people who hadn't spoken to him since middle school.

 

He let the battery on his phone go dead and unplugged his computer. They could wait.

 

_Olga is bound to see the news, even if the police can't track her down._

 

_What then? Olga won't want to stay in Hillwood._

 

It was horribly selfish of him, but Arnold couldn't help hoping that Helga wouldn't be able to walk for a long time. Once she turned eighteen, she was free to do whatever she wanted.

 

…..

 

He didn't get a chance to visit Helga for nearly a week after the press conference, and as hoped the press at the hospital had diminished by about a quarter. The nurses greeted him as he walked around the corridors; they knew him well by now.

 

As he approached Helga's room, he could hear her talking with someone. Someone male: it didn't sound like one of her regular doctors, and it wasn't low and gravelly like Ambrose's voice. It wasn't Plaskett, he was in Pocaselas conferring with the police there on the Waring case load.

 

“...must have hit about three home runs, but poor kid couldn't run to save his life....”

 

It was a young man, with the easygoing relaxed tone of someone who was used to being listened to, always, no matter what he said. Someone who charmed girls effortlessly, without even knowing. Arnold opened the door and saw for himself.

 

Patrick Castle, movie-star-handsome in tight jeans and a loose button down shirt, was showing Helga something on his phone. She was smiling in a way Arnold had not yet seen. He felt as though he'd swallowed a large rock.

 

“Arnold, hi!” she called, noticing him in the doorway. Patrick looked over at him...

 

_Was that a frown?_

 

 _..._ and put away his phone abruptly, leaning back in his seat.

 

“I didn't know you were visiting today,” she said as he took the other seat in the room.

 

_At least someone's happy to see me._

 

“Hey, Arnold,” Patrick said with a lazy wave and an equally lazy smile. “I was just updating Hellebelle on the goings on down at the diamond.”

 

The casual nickname brought out beads of cold sweat on Arnold's skin.

 

 

 


	23. Chapter 23

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Twenty-Three**

 

 

Arnold stayed away from the hospital for longer than he really wanted to, in the aftermath of Patrick's visit. He'd felt on edge the entire time the two of them were in the room together with Helga, Patrick's easy charm and graceful composure made him feel a hundred times more awkward and clumsy in comparison.

 

It was bordering on two weeks since his last visit (after visiting pretty much three times a week, if not more, since she woke up) when Phoebe called him.

 

“She's wondering what's happened to you. Where have you been?” she scolded.

 

“She's getting a lot more visitors now, I figured she wouldn't want me hovering around all the time,” he explained.

 

Phoebe sighed heavily into the mouthpiece.

 

“This is because Patrick's been stopping by, isn't it? God, you idiot...”

 

“I resent that,” Arnold huffed. “I'm perfectly capable of being an idiot without anyone else causing it.”

 

“Listen, she needs you,” Phoebe insisted. “You were the first one there when she woke up, she feels safe around you. You can't just drop her for a month because of some other guy...”

 

“It's been two weeks, Phoebe.”

 

“Whatever, it's still too long. Get Plaskett to drive you over, he's coming down tomorrow. I need to get back to school soon.”

 

“Why is Plaskett going down again?”

 

“Weren't you told?” she said, before mumbling something quietly to herself. “He finally tracked down Olga. She's coming to the hospital.”

 

A little shred of panic ran through Arnold. Olga coming to the hospital likely meant Helga leaving the hospital with her sister to who knows where.

 

“Okay, I'll be down tomorrow morning.”

 

…..

 

Helga clearly wasn't expecting him, because she was thoroughly engrossed in one of those pink notebooks he'd picked up from her house. A small stack of similar notebooks sat on her bedside locker. She jumped when he said hello, and slammed the book shut.

 

“Arnold?” she stammered. Her cheeks were bright red. “You're back?”

 

“Yeah,” he shrugged, laughing sheepishly. “Sorry I've been away so long....I needed to do a whole bunch of repairs at the boarding house. Did Phoebe give you those?”

 

“Yes,” she answered, lying back on the pillows. “She figured they'd fill in some of the gaps in my memory.”

 

“And did they?”

 

“Yep, sure did,” she said, and her blushing intensified. She seemed reluctant to talk about it in more detail.

 

“I can't imagine having to read stuff I wrote when I was a kid,” he offered. “I had some weird ideas.”

 

“Yeah, it's kind of an eye-opener,” she giggled faintly, visibly relaxing.

 

“I heard your sister's coming down here,” he said.

 

“Yes, they finally tracked her down,” said Helga, twisting the edge of the blanket (he was starting to notice it was a nervous gesture she'd developed). “I know I probably shouldn't be, but I'm worried.”

 

“About what?”

 

“I don't even know,” she shrugged, sinking deeper into the mattress. “My memories of her are pretty jumbled, but what I do remember is a lot of crying.”

 

“Yeah, from what I recall she wasn't the most....” he struggled to find the right word, “... _stable_ of people.”

 

“That's what I'm worried about,” she sighed. “If she freaks out on me, what am I supposed to do?”

 

“Get the nurse,” Arnold advised. “They've dealt with freaking out family members before, I guess.”

 

“Would you mind staying?” she asked, sitting up suddenly. “If she does freak out, I'd feel better if someone I know is nearby.”

 

“Well, sure, I don't mind....” he agreed. “But are you sure? You could end up discussing some deep family stuff...”

 

“Yes, I'm sure. You don't even have to be in the room, just near enough so I can call you if I need help.”

 

The ward nurse bustled in a few moments later with a lunch tray, and as they chatted about less serious subjects Arnold couldn't help but notice it took her nearly three hours to eat half of the plate. Since her nasogastric tube had been removed, she hadn't been gaining any weight.

 

“You know they started selling churros at the coffee place,” he offered. “I could bring you in a few if you want, they're pretty good...”

 

“Is this your in-no-way-subtle way of telling me I'm too thin?” she cut him off. “Phoebe beat you to it. Cited the same coffee place, even.”

 

“Sorry,” he groaned. “I know it's none of my business, I just worry, that's all.”

 

“Doctor Enshaw says people who have been unconscious for a long time sometimes have to relearn how to eat,” she explained, demolishing a cube of jello but bringing none of it even close to her mouth. “Along with walking, reading, writing, all the basics. I'm a little behind with the eating.”

 

“Can't they just put the tube back in until you get the hang of it?”

 

“Ew, no,” she grimaced. “That's even worse than the food here.”

 

The nurse came back to take away the tray, and frowned.

 

“Three quarters, we said,” she scolded. “You agreed.”

 

“I know,” Helga mumbled. “Does it have to be mush, though?”

 

“Until you can show us you can keep it down, yes,” the nurse said, and swept out of the room. “By the way, your sister is at the front desk now. She's talking to Dr Enshaw. Should we send her in?”

 

Helga gulped, but she nodded.

 

“I'll just be outside in the hall,” Arnold promised, leaving the room with the nurse. “Call me if you need anything.”

 

…..

 

As expected, Olga devolved into a blubbering, incoherent mess within seconds of entering the room. From the brief glimpse Arnold had gotten of her, she didn't look much different to how he remembered, except for her smart purple suit and 'I-want-to-speak-to-the-manager' haircut. When she had finished her bout of hysterics, she fawned over Helga in the most sickeningly-sweet way possible.

 

She talked a lot about her home, her partner who she was marrying next year, her job managing a local grocery store, her friends and her pastimes and her ' _simply divine'_ trips to Europe. In with all of this, she just about slipped in her new name; Diana Baker, soon to be Mrs Diana Baker-Woods.

 

“We'll have to talk to the board about your new name,” she gushed. “Obviously you can take Baker as a surname but not Baker-Woods, even if legally you're a dependent....”

 

“I don't want to change my name,” Helga cut in.

 

Olga hemmed and hawwed a little, clearly not used to being interrupted midway through a gush.

 

“Oh, honey,” she fawned. “I think it would be best, your old name has all this unpleasantness attached to it, and people would wonder why your name is so different to mine...I mean, I suppose I could introduce you as a distant cousin but this kind of thing, it follows people around...”

 

“I'm going to need my name to bear witness against the guy who kidnapped me,” Helga insisted. “They can build a stronger case against him if I go public, and I'm his only living victim.”

 

She said this with such cool nonchalance that Arnold's admiration for her grew even more, if possible. He heard Olga laugh with clear nervousness.

 

“I suppose, if that's what you want, we'll figure something out,” she said. “You could always change it afterwards. Oh, but I suppose it would come in handy for Daddy's parole hearing...”

 

_What?_

 

“What?” he heard Helga say sharply.

 

“Oh, Daddy's up for parole next year,” Olga explained with that infuriating tinkly quality in her voice, as though she was discussing something cute her dog had done. “That's why I moved to New Mexico, Daddy's just an hour away on a good day. He'd love to see you, once you're up and walking I mean...”

 

“Hold on,” Helga cut across her. “Did you forget why he's in jail? What he did to me?”

 

“Oh honey,” Olga cooed. “Of course I didn't forget, he made a very big mistake and he's done his time for it.”

 

“Mistake?” Arnold could hear Helga gritting her teeth from outside. “It wasn't a _fucking mistake,_ Olga. He planned it. He put drugs in my food and sold pictures of me to perverts. He did it for _months!”_

 

“Please keep your voice down,” Olga hissed, a hard edge introduced to her voice. “I know, okay? He was in a bad place and he made some really stupid decisions. I understand you're angry, I do, but...”

 

She broke off, Arnold could hear her sniffling into a handkerchief.

 

“He's all I had left, Helga,” she implored. “It was so awful once you were gone, and then Mommy died...I had no-one!”

 

“Well then,” Helga retorted, clearly unmoved by Olga's tears. “You got a little taste of what it was like to be me for all those years. Sucks, doesn't it?”

 

“He's sorry, Helga,” Olga begged. “He lives with that regret every day, I know he'd take it back if he could. He's our Daddy...”

 

“He's _your_ Daddy,” Helga growled. “As far as I'm concerned he's the guy who sold me out to the monster that locked me in a dog crate and shot me in the head. And that bullshit about regret....if he could do it all over again without getting caught, he would.”

 

“Okay, you're getting upset, I'm sorry,” Olga said, closing her purse with an audible click. “Maybe I should come back later when you've gotten some rest.”

 

“I rested for five years, I don't need any more,” Helga said. “But you should leave. Don't bother coming back. You can sign over your rights to the state and I can be someone else's problem.”

 

Olga said nothing more, but turned and walked out of the room. Although there were mascara-streaked tears running down her face, Arnold could detect something else in her expression, in the shape of her shoulders and the loose grip on her purse.

 

She looked relieved.

 

…..

 

He left her that night, after being by her side to comfort her as she cried for almost a solid hour then sheepishly apologizing for messing up his shirt. He felt drained himself; it was true that you only saw how good a person was when disaster struck. He'd thought Olga to be a better person than that.

 

The next day, he was back at school, sulking his way through homeroom when Gerald approached him again.

 

“Wassup?” he shrugged, by way of a greeting.

 

“Is this about Phoebe, again?” Arnold groaned. “I told you, we're not...”

 

“No, it's not,” Gerald said irritably. He slunk into the seat next to Arnold. “It's about Helga, actually. How's she doing?”

 

“She's doing okay,” Arnold said, noncommittally. “I mean, she can't walk yet but she's making progress. Why do you want to know?”

 

“Couldn't help but notice she hasn't got one of those crowdfunding deals set up,” Gerald explained. “I mean, there's a few fakes but they got flagged real quick before anyone lost their money.”

 

“What's your point?”

 

“My point is, me and my boys want to contribute,” Gerald said, lowering his voice to a whisper and taking an envelope out of his bag. “I figure you can get it to her direct.”

 

The envelope was thick, almost bulging, as Gerald pressed it into his hand. Arnold was so gobsmacked he couldn't think of a word to say.

 

“That's about eight grand, give or take. I didn't count it,” Gerald told him. “Should help towards them hospital bills, right?”

 

“Yeah....” Arnold gulped. “Gerald, this is...”

 

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Gerald said, getting up. “Just make sure it gets to the right people, okay?”

 

And with that, he was gone.

 

As much of a surprise as Gerald was, Rhonda shocked him even more. She caught him at his locker once again and handed him a bag.

 

“Tried to give this to Phoebe but she ran off before I could,” she deadpanned, slapping the bag in his general direction. “Give it to Helga.”

 

“What is it?” Arnold asked.

 

“Just a few things,” Rhonda shrugged elegantly. “Being stuck in bed sucks, might as well be comfortable.”

 

Arnold took a brief look in the bag. Everything inside was brand-new, plastic wrapped. A sleeping mask, plush robe, slippers....all high-grade luxury brands, and not chosen at random. Rhonda had picked these out herself.

 

“If anything's the wrong size, get back to me,” she said, examining her nails instead of looking Arnold in the eyes. “I saw the pictures and guessed. She looks like a thinspo pic.”

 

“I don't know what to say,” Arnold choked. “Except thanks. Thank you so much.”

 

Rhonda's nose wrinkled with distaste.

 

“Whatev,” she said with a wave, and then she was gone.

 

 

 

 


	24. Chapter 24

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Twenty Four**

 

 

 

A note on the last chapter; a few people expressed surprise that Olga would side with Bob rather than Helga. Unfortunately, in cases of family-based sexual abuse it is very common for relatives to believe the abuser over the abused, mostly because it's easier to believe that the abused is lying than it is to believe someone they love would be capable of doing something evil. I felt this would be the dynamic when Helga was so clearly on the outside of her family and Olga so prone to avoiding anything uncomfortable. I hope that clears up any confusion ye may have had.

 

…..

 

According to the nurse that pulled Arnold to one side on his most recent visit, Helga had spiraled downwards in the aftermath of her sister's visit. She'd eaten the equivalent of maybe two pieces of toast in three days, slept for nearly a full twenty-four hours and wasn't speaking much.

 

“We may have to put the nasal tube back in if she doesn't improve,” the nurse sighed. “But it'll have to wait until she gets back.”

 

“Back from where?” Arnold asked, sneaking worried glances in the direction of Helga's room.

 

“The detective is taking her out. Didn't he tell you?”

 

“No, he didn't.”

 

“Oh, well,” she muttered. “She needs to identify her abductor in a line-up. Apparently his lawyer demanded it.”

 

“Can he do that?” Arnold asked, incredulously.

 

“I chose to work in healthcare, not law,” the nurse shrugged. “I think they're trying to prove she's not fit to give evidence. And she won't be unless she starts eating properly.”

 

“I'll see what I can do.”

 

When he got to Helga's room, she was poking at a slice of dry-looking cake with a spoon, a look of distaste set in her face.

 

“I can get you better cake, if you want,” he said by way of a greeting.

 

She jumped a little; clearly she hadn't been expecting him.

 

“That's okay,” she laughed softly. “It all kind of tastes like ash anyway.”

 

He swallowed hard. Had the brain injury affected her sense of taste, or was it psychological? For the first time since she'd woken up Arnold realized there was no telling how much damage had been done, and how much she'd have to live with for the rest of her life. He'd sort of assumed that once she put on weight and started walking again, she'd live a relatively normal life.

 

Eating was pretty much the most normal thing a person could do, and if she was struggling with that then what hope was there for her?

 

“The nurse is worried,” he said gingerly.

 

“I know. They're all worried,” Helga sighed. “I'll get past this, just....not right now.”

 

“I'm sure they won't mind if we bring in some better stuff....”

 

“It's not the taste, Arnold,” she cut him off.

 

She seemed to struggle with her words, opening and closing her mouth and fidgeting up against her pillow.

 

“Look, you know most of what happened with Bob,” she said at last.

 

“You don't have to tell me anything...” Arnold started to say.

 

“I know, but I'm going to,” she said sharply. “Bob used to cook these big meals for me and Miriam. It was always, like, messy stuff. You know, casseroles, stews and stuff like that. A big pile of random ingredients. I didn't know it at the time, but that was how he was drugging me whenever I was home. Probably Miriam too, now that I think about it.”

 

She was so matter-of-fact about it that it made Arnold want to cry on her behalf. As it was, he was sick with the horror of it.

 

“That was bad enough,” Helga continued, staring down at her desiccated cake slice. “Then that guy....he hardly ever told me what he was giving me to eat. It was always some big slab of barely-cooked meat. Most of it still had blood dripping out of it. And if I didn't choke it down...”

 

She shoved the plate away from herself, folded her arms.

 

“Well, let's just say he had ways of making me do things I didn't want to do.”

 

“I'm so sorry,” Arnold said.

 

“Why? You didn't do anything.”

 

“I know,” he sighed. “I guess....I have been putting some pressure on you to eat. Like, it's understandable you wouldn't want to after all that.”

 

They sat in somewhat uncomfortable silence, neither knowing what to say. The air was heavy, tense. How could anyone make small talk after a conversation like that?

 

Luckily, they were saved by the arrival of Ambrose Palmer, who was carrying a paper bag of something fragrant.

 

“Hey there, princess,” he said as Helga rolled her eyes and laughed. “Hi....I want to say Arthur?”

 

“Arnold,” Arnold corrected.

 

“Right, Arnold,” Ambrose nodded. “Sorry, the old grey matter's a bit squeaky these days. Want a brownie?”

 

He opened the bag and handed Arnold a slab of rich chocolate topped with a creamy white and pink glaze. Arnold didn't miss the way Helga squinted at it, and he was sure Ambrose didn't either.

 

“These look fancy,” Arnold said through his first bite. “They taste fancy too.”

 

“Old family recipe,” Ambrose shrugged, taking one out for himself and nonchalantly placing one in front of Helga. “Raspberry cheesecake topping, one of Ed's favourites. Figured you kids might like 'em too.”

 

“Did you make these just for today's visit?” Helga asked after taking a (very) delicate bite.

 

“We're gonna be in the truck for a while, I been thinking we need the sugar.”

 

Helga just about finished the brownie before they packed her into her wheelchair to drive her to Pocaselas. Ambrose had managed to make more progress with her in five minutes than the hospital staff had in weeks.

 

…..

 

They had to smuggle Helga out of the back entrance of the hospital; there were still a few press agents lingering, waiting for a sign that she was going to be moved. Ambrose had offered to drive her, and Arnold offered to tag along for moral support, both of which Officer Plaskett had agreed to eagerly. He had become a tad manic in these last few days, the excitement of nailing Curtis Waring to the wall put a spring in his step.

 

At least, if Helga could identify him.

 

The police officers in the building had formed a little huddle at the entrance, trying to act as though they weren't staring at Helga as she was wheeled in. Arnold saw more than one of them wince at how thin she still was.

 

“Take your time,” Plaskett was advising her, flipping through sheets on a clipboard. “Look at all of them carefully, look for distinguishing marks rather than facial features. It helps if you don't make eye contact, they can't see you but they can act like they do. Understand?”

 

Helga swallowed and nodded.

 

“Good,” Plaskett said, and he brought them to a door, knocking gently.

 

The door swung open and they were ushered in; Arnold had been told it was rare to allow strangers who weren't participating in the identifying into the room, but special exceptions were made for those that needed some extra support. The man in the smart suit and expensive-looking glasses was clearly not happy about Arnold and Ambrose being there.

 

“One person is what we agreed,” he said stiffly, rising from his chair to confront Plaskett. “I hardly think Miss Pataki needs two men in here with her?”

 

“Miss Pataki has little enough real support as it is,” Plaskett shot back. “Plus you insisted we drag her all the way down here instead of using the photofit...”

 

“I shouldn't have to explain procedure to you,” the suited man cut across him. “One man. The other waits outside.”

 

“I'll stay out,” Ambrose agreed with a casual shrug. “Give 'em hell, princess.”

 

Arnold caught her rolling her eyes at the nickname but all the same she seemed pleased. Not a bad thing considering she was going to confront, however indirectly, the man who shot her in the head.

 

He wheeled her in to the viewing room, watching the set of her hands on her lap for any sign of distress. She seemed okay, confident even. The room was barely lit by a single dim bulb, and sparsely furnished with a small table and stool that the lawyer took a seat at. Plaskett flicked a light switch, and the mirrored glass stretching across the far end of the room became a window.

 

“Ready?” Plaskett asked, finger poised on the intercom.

 

Helga took a deep breath, and nodded.

 

“Send them in,” Plaskett hissed into the intercom.

 

Into the room beyond the mirror, five men ambled without purpose, slouched up against the wall to denote their heights, stared sullenly into the glass in the general direction of who they presumed were watching. Arnold peered at them carefully; which one was it?

 

He'd imagined he could pick Waring out of a crowd, that someone who could have killed all those women and kept a little girl chained up like a dog would have the evil in him painted across his face. Even if he'd managed to look normal for all those years, surely he would have some quality that set him apart from the others?

 

But these men looked like completely normal men. He couldn't have pegged one of them as Waring if he'd had to choose. They must have worked to find four men who looked enough like Waring to cause confusion.

 

“Just relax, take as much time as....” Plaskett began to advise.

 

“It's number four,” Helga interrupted.

 

“You sound certain,” the lawyer piped up from over by the wall.

 

“I am certain,” she replied. “It's number four. Definitely.”

 

Arnold searched the man's face. His nose looked like it had been broken at least once, and he had a lot of broken blood vessels across his cheeks, but otherwise looked like an average middle-aged man. He could have been someone's uncle, football coach, next-door neighbour.

 

There had to be some sign, right? What did Helga see when she looked at this man?

 

“Could you explain why you picked number four?” the lawyer asked. Clearly he'd been thinking along the same lines as Arnold.

 

“One of his nostrils is bigger than the other,” Helga explained. “He snores because of it. And he's missing the tip of his left ring finger because he cut it off with the cleaver.”

 

The finger couldn't be seen from where they were, but they knew now Helga could provide a long list of ways to pick Waring out.

 

“There you have it,” Plaskett said snidely to the lawyer. “We'll see you in court. Can I take this girl back to her hospital bed now?”

 

The lawyer said nothing, just waved them away.

 

…..

 

“Colour me surprised that guy could afford a decent lawyer,” Ambrose said once they were back in the truck. “Wasn't he one of them doomsday prepper guys?”

 

“He had an inheritance he never touched,” Helga told them. “The underground stuff was just a hobby, more or less.”

 

She looked fine, a little white but otherwise no worse for wear. If the outing had been a strain on her, she was very good at hiding it. After a few miles, Ambrose veered the truck off of the highway into the underbrush.

 

“Milady here could use some fresh air,” he explained when asked, to Helga rolling her eyes again. “I got the doctor's permission, no problem. Long as we're back before nine.”

 

They ended up at a small boathouse and jetty overlooking a moderately-sized lake. Ambrose handed Arnold a lifejacket and tied Helga's on her himself before carefully putting her into the small fishing boat sitting in the water. He wrapped a blanket securely around her legs before he handed Arnold the other oar.

 

They rowed out quite a ways before Ambrose instructed him to pull the oar in so they could float freely.

 

“It's around the right time,” he said, popping open a pocketwatch. “Keep your eyes at the clearing over yonder.”

 

“What are we looking for?” Helga asked.

 

“You'll see soon enough.”

 

After a few moments of waiting, there was a crackling in the underbrush at the clearing and a young doe stepped out onto the riverbank. She waded up to her chest before she began to drink, and in another moment a fawn stepped out with her, wading out to its neck. They stayed there, shooting cautious glances at the boat, as more deer emerged from the forest into the water.

 

Stags now, old ones with crowded antlers and youthful ones still bearing some of their dapples, pushed their way past the lingering does and fawns, circled around the bank to swim to another clearing. The water was calm, smooth as glass but for their disruption. A few derisive snorts in the direction of the boat was all the notice they paid to the people watching them.

 

“Ain't that a sight,” Ambrose whispered.

 

Arnold could only nod in agreement; Helga was utterly still, transfixed. If she even heard him, she gave no sign.

 

…..

 

She was asleep by the time they got her back to the hospital, and Ambrose offered to drive Arnold home despite his protests that it was too far.

 

“Shoot, I got nothing better to do,” Ambrose shrugged in that carefree way that Arnold was getting so familiar with.

 

Along the way, he managed to get some more details about Ambrose out of him. He learned about the ranch he had now retired from, how he'd traveled all over America doing odd jobs before settling down with his partner, how he'd been at a loose end since his partner died. Arnold even managed to get him talking about finding Helga, though he'd seemed reluctant to talk about it.

 

“Nearly ran her over,” Ambrose mumbled. “Didn't see her 'til the last minute and even then I though she was a wandering deer.”

 

“She was lucky you came that way,” Arnold said.

 

“Not luck, I don't think. If she was lucky she wouldn't have been there in the first place,” Ambrose replied. “I do think it was meant to happen, though....happened the same day I went to pick up Ed's things, some coincidence huh?”

 

“Yeah,” Arnold agreed. “Almost like she was sent to you.”

 

“I guess.”

 

They sat in silence. Arnold wanted to ask, but it was such a long shot that he was afraid to let the idea out for how bad he'd feel if it went nowhere. But....

 

“You know her sister came to see her the other day?” he began.

 

“I heard. She wouldn't talk about it but I heard it went south.”

 

“Yeah...I'm not that surprised, Olga was known to be a bit flaky. But this means she's probably going to be a ward of the state.”

 

Ambrose sighed.

 

“I know what you're gonna ask,” he said. “That Plaskett guy beat you to it. You want me to take her in, am I right?”

 

“Well, yeah,” Arnold mumbled. “I mean, you've been looking after her since you found her. You don't want to?”

 

“I would in a heartbeat,” Ambrose admitted. “But that's for the courts to decide. Me and Ed tried to adopt years ago, but we got denied a whole bunch of times and gave up in the end. That was when there were two of us, with a permanent home and at least one steady job and we were much younger. Now I'm in my late fifties, no partner, rented apartment....what do I have to offer?”

 

“She loves you,” Arnold said. “And you love her. She's sixteen, that counts for a lot in court, and she's famous whether we like it or not. Public pressure has to count for something.”

 

“I'd have to move,” Ambrose mused, and Arnold's heart skipped because it sounded like he was giving it real thought. “She needs to be near a hospital, at least. And I wouldn't like to take her away from her friends...”

 

“Would you do that?”

 

“'Course,” Ambrose shrugged. “I got no ties to Warleybridge. Ed's ashes come with me. There anywhere to rent in Hillwood?”

 

Arnold could feel the blood climbing to his face as his heart beat wildly.

 

“Hillwood's never been great property-wise,” he admitted. “But my grandparents run a boarding house. It's not great, it's kind of run down these days, but....”

 

“That's no problem,” Ambrose shrugged. “Long as the rent is low enough I can fix whatever.”

 

By the time they reached Hillwood, it was too late to invite Ambrose in to see it for himself, but he gave a tacit approval before he let Arnold out of the truck.

 

“We might have to get a ramp put in round back,” he said, as casual as always. “I can do that, no problem, if'n your folks are okay with it.”

 

“It should be fine,” Arnold nodded furiously.

 

“We should probably discuss this with Helga though,” he laughed. “Making all these plans without her seems a bit off.”

 

“She'll be fine with it,” Arnold swore. “I'm sure she will.”

 

He couldn't sleep a wink that night. His mind was full of plans, hopes.

 

Helga could move in with Ambrose to one of the ground floor rooms, two if they needed the space. She could eventually come back to school, gradually live a normal life. And she would be with Arnold day in, day out.

 

Eventually, she might even remember that she had been there before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	25. Chapter 25

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Twenty Five**

 

This is a note to say that updates may be a touch sporadic from this month onwards, I'm in the process of moving and this is a busy time of year for me even without the added stress of getting two houses ready for new inhabitants. I will try to update on a weekly basis at the very least.

 

 

…..

 

When Olga was given the opportunity to sign away her parental rights, she did it with a speed that Arnold found profoundly hurtful, even though he wasn't on the receiving end. Helga seemed to shrug it off, but it was hard to know what she was thinking most of the time. She was attending mandatory counseling sessions at the hospital but she had told both Arnold and Phoebe that the therapist was insincere and pretty useless.

 

She was now officially a ward of the state, and Ambrose was applying to adopt her, but because she wasn't well enough to leave the hospital yet it looked like she wouldn't have to spend any time in foster care.

 

“Most foster families don't like taking special needs kids,” Phoebe finished her long-winded explanation over lunch. “Unless they're a family that _only_ takes special needs kids, and there's only a few of those _and_ they live mostly in Wisconsin and Nebraska...”

 

“Helga's not really special needs though,” Arnold interjected. “She has a temporary condition, she's going to get better.”

 

Phoebe sighed, and put down the forkful of salad she'd been ignoring to talk about the adoption process.

 

“She had a _really_ severe brain injury, Arnold,” she explained, as if to a small child. “And she's only been conscious for a short time compared to how long she was out of it. There's no real way of telling what it's going to be like for her in the future. Getting better is the best case scenario, and it's a real long shot.”

 

“She doesn't seem that bad,” Arnold countered, although now he was a little worried. It hadn't really occurred to him that Helga's recovery would backslide.

 

“Her cognitive functions are good, and her motor skills are mostly good too,” Phoebe said. “But she hasn't really had to do anything outside the hospital besides identifying Curtis Waring, so she could struggle with stuff you or I find easy. You ever hear of executive dysfunction?”

 

“Kind of, like online I think?”

 

“It's what happens when an injured brain can't work through a task properly. Reacting to things differently than expected, or not being able to focus. Erratic behavior.”

 

Arnold thought of his grandmother. She'd been like that for years, and they had always put it down to dementia. Had she maybe had some head trauma they didn't know about?

 

“How do you know all this, anyway?” Arnold asked her. “They're hardly letting you read her medical files?”

 

“Officer Plaskett told me,” she answered. “He thought it would be helpful for us to know since we spend so much time with her.”

 

“He hasn't told me anything...”

 

“That's because you don't call him. You call him, he'll tell you anything you want to know,” Phoebe said, and finally shoved the forkful of salad into her mouth.

 

“How much do you call him, to know all this stuff?”

 

“Not that much anymore,” she admitted. “But back when she was first found I called him at least once a day.”

 

“Why?”

 

“I don't know,” she shrugged. “I don't get to visit her that often. It made me feel better. And he's never acted like it annoyed him or anything, so I kept doing it.”

 

“That's pretty nice of him,” Arnold said.

 

“Well, he's real invested in the case,” Phoebe told him. “He needs Helga to be in good shape for Waring's trial, she's his only living victim. So it suits him to keep you and me informed in case anything happens.”

 

“Didn't you just say Helga had that executive-disjunction? How are they going to get her to testify in court if she's that bad?”

 

“She's not that bad,” Phoebe said, leaning back and folding her arms. “Right now. That could change. So we need to be careful. No stress, especially after that Olga debacle. We keep her as happy as we can.”

 

…..

 

The nurse sent Arnold to the physiotherapy hall when he arrived for his visit, but when he got there he was sorely tempted to run to the safety of the cafeteria and wait there until the coast was clear.

 

It was _really_ irritating how good Patrick looked when he wasn't even trying.

 

He was standing just behind Helga on the support bars, gently encouraging her to make it to the end where her wheelchair was waiting. Arnold couldn't hear what he was saying to her, but he did just about make out the words 'baseball' 'practice' and 'season.'

 

_More baseball bonding memories. Great._

 

It was silly to be so jealous that a good-looking guy was paying attention to someone Arnold wasn't even dating, but he knew that baseball had been a very important bright spot in the otherwise hard childhood Helga had been dragged through. Patrick came with his own special set of memories while all Arnold had was a story about a ghost that may not have even happened.

 

Helga made it to the end of the bars and Patrick helped her lower herself into the chair. She was looking better now, she'd put on a little weight and could walk short distances with the aid of a walker. Or maybe she was glowing because of the attention Patrick was showering on her.

 

“Arnold!”

 

Her calling him jolted him out of his simmering, and he realized he'd been standing in the doorway sulking for who knows how long.

 

“Hey,” he said, feeling the blush rise on his neck as he made his way to her. “You're doing good, getting back on your feet?”

 

“Yeah, I'm just about ready for the Boston marathon,” she quipped. Patrick laughed as though it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard.

 

_Her wit is still there, the brain injury didn't do anything to it. Phoebe's worried about nothing._

 

“Paralympics are coming up,” Patrick said, pushing her chair towards the door. “Keep it up, you could win the gold.”

 

“I think you're overestimating,” she responded. “I don't even push the chair most of the time.”

 

“But when you do, you're pretty damn fast,” Patrick shot back.

 

Helga rolled her eyes and slumped a little in her chair. By the time they got back to her room she was half-asleep.

 

“I need to shower,” she mumbled as Patrick lifted her into the bed.

 

“Call the nurse when you wake up,” Patrick said. “Me and Arnold can wait in the cafeteria.”

 

Great. Now Arnold was stuck hanging out with the guy. Still, he said nothing as they walked out of Helga's room to the cafeteria, nothing as he bought that strangely gritty coffee he was now very familiar with, nothing until Patrick came to the table with his own gritty coffee and he supposed he should try to make some sort of conversation.

 

“So, uh, she seems to be...”

 

“Level with me, Arnold,” Patrick cut across him, sounding a lot less pleasant away from Helga. “When you came to see me that time....did you know she was alive?”

 

“What? No, I had no idea...” Arnold spluttered, caught off guard.

 

“Right,” Patrick scoffed. “You turn up at my place of work to gouge me about a girl that's been missing for five years and two months later she's found alive in some backwoods hospital?”

 

“I know, it looks weird,” Arnold agreed.

 

“Weird is an understatement.”

 

“Honestly, I didn't know. I was working under the assumption she was dead, and I was looking for who killed her. Her being alive was a very lucky coincidence.”

 

“So you want me to believe you found evidence that trained police missed by some fluke?” Patrick said. His voice was quiet but full of carefully controlled anger.

 

“If I told you, you wouldn't believe me,” Arnold sighed, gripping his coffee cup so hard it burned his hands.

 

“Try me. Because from where I'm sitting, it looks like you knew something about where she was the whole time. I'd like to think differently.”

 

“Fine,” Arnold said, taking a deep breath. “Helga's ghost appeared in my house.”

 

Patrick didn't start laughing, nor did he angrily demand that Arnold quit bullshitting. A raised eyebrow was the only reaction he gave.

 

“It seemed like she needed help to move on, so I said I'd try to help her. I already had some theories, I've been following the case online since I was twelve, and she helped me put the pieces together. She lead me to you, to that hideout she used to go to, even to the place Waring kept her captive and shot her.”

 

Arnold took a large gulp of his coffee before he continued.

 

“Then once the police got involved and found out her body wasn't there, and her ghost hadn't moved on, she lead me to Warleybridge. The ghost finally did move on once I found her here and she woke up.”

 

He had a vague sense that telling his truth in such a matter-of-fact way was going to get him chewed out by Patrick at best, beaten up at worst. He stared into his coffee, waiting for the inevitable.

 

“Huh.”

 

The little noise was as much as he got. He looked up, astonished.

 

“Who else knows about this?” Patrick asked. He didn't look angry anymore.

 

“Um, Phoebe does. She was there for most of it. I mean, she only saw Helga's ghost once and the rest of the time only I could see her but...”

 

He trailed off. It sounded completely insane when spoken aloud.

 

“And if I go grilling Phoebe, she'll tell me the same thing?”

 

“Y-yeah, she would...”

 

“Right. Interesting.”

 

“Wait....so, you actually _believe me_?”

 

Patrick shrugged and smiled that movie-star smile Arnold had come to know (and loathe.)

 

“It sounds so out there that the only reason you'd tell me such a pack of nonsense is if it was true,” he mused. “Stranger things have happened.”

 

Arnold couldn't believe it. The first time he'd talked about the ghost with someone who wasn't Phoebe and they took it seriously.

 

“Have you told Helga about any of this?” Patrick asked.

 

“No,” Arnold snorted, still incredulous. “She'd think I was crazy...and I don't want to stress her out.”

 

“So she doesn't remember being a ghost?”

 

“I dunno, the nurses said she had lucid moments when she talked about things she'd done when she was haunting my house,” Arnold told him. “She hasn't brought it up, and her memory is mixed up anyway...”

 

“Best to keep it between us then,” Patrick said. “Like you said, no stress. This trial is going to be tough on her, she needs as much support as she can get.”

 

“Is that why you brought me out here for an interrogation?”

 

“Maybe,” Patrick agreed. “Or maybe I'm doing what good big brothers do, keeping sketchy guys away.”

 

_Big brother?_

 

“Sketchy?” Arnold quipped.

 

“Well, what would you call a guy who goes around asking random people about murder victims they knew?” Patrick half-laughed. “Plus obviously I failed the first time...I got a second chance, I'm going to try and do right by her this time.”

 

That 'big brother' lingered in the air between them. Arnold wanted to ask about it, wanted to ask about his intentions without letting Patrick know how badly Arnold was pining after her. But luckily Patrick seemed to pick up on it without Arnold having to say a word.

 

“Between college and my boyfriend I don't get to spend as much time with her as I'd like to,” he tossed out flippantly. “Think you can keep other sketchy guys away for me?”

 

_Boyfriend?_

 

Patrick laughed, and Arnold blushed. He didn't realize he'd said that out loud.

 

“Yes, boyfriend. Two years now,” he explained.

 

“I thought you were....”

 

“I was,” he shrugged. “I had counseling when she went missing and I made my peace with it, in a way. Angelo's my best friend as well as my boyfriend, he supported me through it all. Plus even if I had known she was alive, the age difference looks a bit weird now. I can be her big brother, that's good enough for me.”

 

All this time Arnold had spent stewing over the threat that Patrick presented had blinded him to what a good, good guy he was. A cold trickle of shame ran through him.

 

“I assume she doesn't know you're head over heels for her, am I right?”

 

 _That_ came out of nowhere. Arnold choked on his coffee.

 

“What....” he sputtered. “I'm not...I mean, it's....

 

“That's okay,” Patrick consoled, flashing that irresistible (and infuriatingly smug) smile at him. “Your secret's safe with me.”

 

…..

 

Helga woke up just in time for Patrick to say goodbye before he left to get back to college. That left Arnold alone with her for at least another hour before he had to catch his bus back to Pocaselas. To his dismay, his face was still red.

 

“Are you okay?” she asked, frowning. “You look like you have a fever.”

 

“Coffee was way too hot,” Arnold explained, hoping she'd buy that. “Why is it that hospital food is always so terrible?”

 

“I know,” she groaned. “You'd think if they wanted me to gain weight they'd get better cooks.”

 

They chatted back and forth casually. Phoebe had given Helga a new cellphone the week before, and though there were smartphones around before she went missing she had never had one and barely knew how to use it. Arnold was taking her through most of the social media apps when he happened to look up and noticed something alarming.

 

“Uh,” he stammered, unsure of how serious it was. “Should....should I call a nurse?”

 

Helga raised her hand to her face and touched the stream of almost-black blood running from her nose. She rolled her eyes, as though it was a minor inconvenience.

“Don't bother,” she said, grabbing a box of tissues from the chest by the bed. “It usually only happens in the mornings.”

 

She dabbed at the blood casually. Arnold's horror didn't abate even a little.

 

_Mornings? Usually?_

 

“So, this happens often?” he asked.

 

She nodded.

 

“I have a lot of scar tissue near my brain,” she explained. “Didn't make much of a difference when I was unconscious but because it's shifting around now I get these nosebleeds. There's probably more to it than that but that's how the doctor explained it.”

 

“Okay,” Arnold said, although it came out more high-pitched and panicky than he intended.

 

“I'm going for an MRI next week, if it makes you feel better.”

 

It didn't make him feel better. He associated MRI scans, like most people who watched TV, with sick and injured people near death. She might as well have said she was going to be defibrillated next week.

 

_This is why they want no stress. If this gets worse she probably can't testify against Waring._

 

Arnold felt a little stab of anger that Plaskett wanted to prevent her stress not for her own well-being but so that he could get Waring convicted.

 

“By the way,” she said, dabbing as much of the blood away as she could. “We have a trial date. July 7th.”

 

Summer. Three months away. At the very least now he knew he'd be able to stay by her side throughout the trial. He hoped it would help.

 


	26. Chapter 26

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Twenty Six**

 

So by now the fic has moved quite far from the original idea and is moving closer to the issues surrounding the rest of Arnold and Helga's lives. I'm wondering if I should make this and the next chapter the last two and start another fic about the aftermath? What do the readers think?

 

 

…..

 

_Three months on:_

 

Arnold knew his grandfather wasn't happy about letting Ambrose and Helga move into the boarding house, but financially he wasn't really in a position to refuse a paying customer. It looked like the adoption process was going through with no problems, and thanks to Helga's many donated funds she was able to get a ramp installed in the back of the house, as well as repairs done on the ground floor. Even Phil had to admit that it was a relief getting some of the old fixtures replaced.

 

Curtis Waring's trial was coming up, and although Helga was able to walk with a cane now she couldn't walk for long and would have a permanent limp thanks to a shattered ankle she sustained during her catatonia. It was decided for her own safety that she would stay in the hospital for the duration of the trial, to prevent any backsliding in her condition.

 

Ambrose moved into the two room apartment without her, and set about making it habitable for a man and a young girl. It hadn't been touched since the last person who lived there moved out seven years before, and had been neglected by both Phil and Arnold since they had all the other rooms to service. Ambrose stripped the dingy wallpaper, tossed the old moth-eaten furniture and gave the whole place a new coat of paint. By the end it barely looked like it belonged in the boarding house.

 

“Is Helga's trust fund covering all this?” Arnold asked when he stopped by to bring Ambrose a glass of iced tea.

 

“I didn't touch none of her money,” Ambrose told him from the ladder he was using to paint the wall sconces. “I have plenty of my own.”

 

He drove back to his old apartment to collect his furniture and his dog, an old bloodhound named Della. Arnold helped him carry the stuff in, and he was struck by how many classic antique pieces Ambrose owned. Ambrose caught him staring at a particularly fancy chair, and laughed.

 

“Ed picked out most of this stuff,” he explained. “I didn't care so long as I could sit on the porch of an evenin'. But I figured Helga would like that chair.”

 

A set of pictures went up on the walls, most of them Ambrose's deceased partner or the two of them together with Della lying in front of them. Arnold liked the look of Ed; a chubby middle-aged man with a receding hairline and a quirky grin. It really was a shame that they'd never been able to adopt together, but he knew Ambrose felt like Ed had sent Helga to him so in some way she was their daughter.

 

“Ed would've loved her,” Ambrose said once. “He always wanted a little girl, especially a little spitfire.”

 

Ambrose was as good with Arnold's grandmother as he was with Helga. He was patient with her nonsense rambling, which had just gotten worse since the stroke, and he often helped her out with cooking in the evenings. Phil had been quiet, cautious around him at first, but even he came around eventually when Ambrose offered to take a look at any of the broken fixtures in the house.

 

“I'll take it out of your rent,” Phil offered. “Since you're saving me a repairman's bill...”

 

“Nah, keep it,” Ambrose shrugged. “I like to keep busy. Let Della warm herself in the kitchen and we'll call it even.”

 

But what was best about Ambrose moving in was that now Arnold had a lift every time he visited the hospital, instead of having to make the long journey by bus and staying in that crappy motel overnight. Phoebe hopped in with them sometimes, and even Patrick tagged along though he had a car of his own and was busy with college.

 

Helga was doing well. She had a good, safe place to live when she got out of the hospital, someone to take care of her the way she deserved and her friends nearby. She would have everything she needed. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

 

Nothing.

 

…..

 

On the first day of the trial, reporters showed up on Arnold's doorstep and peppered him with questions as he and Ambrose were trying to leave. He heard at least one ask about him finding the murder scene and a few mentions of the words 'crime forums.'

 

“No comment,” he managed to remember to say as he barreled through them to Ambroses' truck.

 

They were worse at the hospital, and were wise to the trick of sneaking Helga out the back. Officer Plaskett covered her with his coat as Ambrose pushed her chair, and by the time they got her into the truck she seemed a little freaked out.

 

“They had cameras,” she murmured. “I thought they weren't allowed take pictures of me?”

 

“The gag order is up because you waived anonymity,” Plaskett explained. “Unfortunately, that's what it's going to be like for a while. I'll keep you under wraps as much as I can but realistically a few pictures are going to be released. This case is very high profile.”

 

Arnold saw her swallow, hard.

 

“Don't be too nervous,” Plaskett continued. “The defense has been warned to stick to certain topics and not to grill you. The judge will interfere if they get goady, and if you feel like you need a break you just ask for it. Don't push yourself too hard.”

 

The court was mobbed with reporters, onlookers and a handful of people holding up signs of support or condemnation. There was a pretty shocking amount of people that thought Helga was lying about Waring, and that his other victims were just human garbage that the world didn't miss. The court police cleared a path but they had to carry her up the steps, and Arnold had a feeling that that was an image that would show up on the news that night: Ambrose carrying her bridal-style up the stairs while Plaskett and Arnold lugged her wheelchair behind them.

 

They were allowed into the courtroom early, to make sure Helga was comfortable and ready. The judge even came in plain clothes to talk to her privately. He looked nice, a grandfatherly type of man, but Plaskett had warned that he was a hard man with a poker face you could never interpret. Waring's lawyer, wearing another painfully expensive suit, came in early too to discuss with the judge.

 

The jury trickled in, a distinct mix of young and old, men and women from all walks of life. Two black, three vaguely Hispanic, one Asian, four white. According to Plaskett that was a good mix. Spectators and support filled the benches, court reporters took their seats, the prosecuting lawyer arrived too late to talk to Helga but at least looked smart.

 

Finally, Waring was brought in. In a suit, not even handcuffed, groomed and trimmed to look as normal and nonthreatening as possible.

 

Even so, Arnold heard Helga draw in a ragged breath and saw her hands clench under the desk.

 

…..

 

For three straight hours, Waring's lawyer built up an image of a man who had been accused of nothing more than a misdemeanor. He painted a picture of a shy and quiet man whose desire to keep to himself and live a back-to-nature life in the woods lead to him being accused of murdering prostitutes. He made it sound like the girls who had gone missing from Pocaselas had brought it upon themselves by entering the notoriously risky job of streetwalking.

 

The prosecution brought up his dishonourable discharge from the military, but even this was dismissed as a petty act by a vengeful ex. By the time Helga was called to the stand, Waring was being painted as a saint with some spiteful enemies.

 

But even Helga's presence in the court dimmed the lawyer's hard work. The jury looked on sympathetically as she wheeled herself to the bench and was sworn in.

 

“Could you state your full name for the court, please?” the lawyer began.

 

“Helga Geraldine Pataki.”

 

“And, how old are you, Helga?”

 

“Sixteen.”

 

“How old were you when you claim to have been involved with my client?”

 

“I was eleven when he caught me.”

 

“Caught you? Am I to believe there was a struggle?”

 

“Yes, he threw something over my head and knocked me to the ground. Then he jabbed me with something.”

 

“That's a little vague...could you elaborate?”

 

“A needle. He jabbed me with a needle. Whatever was in it knocked me out.”

 

“I see....could you tell us where he caught you?”

 

“In the woods, the hills just outside Hillwood.”

 

“And what were you doing out there? According to your statement, this was just after dawn, am I right?”

 

“It was about 8am, I was trying to get downtown early. I spent the night up there.”

 

“You spent the night in the woods?”

 

“I had a hideout there, I slept up there sometimes.”

 

“I see, and what did your parents think of you sleeping in a cave in the woods?”

 

“They didn't know.”

 

Helga was impressively stoic on the stand, but Arnold's irritation with the lawyer was building. His rapid-fire questioning was clearly designed to knock her off balance.

 

“Is it safe to call you a runaway, in that case? Because you had gone hiding somewhere without your parent's knowledge?” he continued.

 

“I suppose so,” Helga shrugged.

 

“That's a risky thing for a little girl to do.”

 

“No riskier than staying at home, I thought.”

 

“Were you aware that there were other people in the woods at that time of day?”

 

“No. I'd been staying up there a long time, I hardly ever saw anyone else. It was rough terrain.”

 

“But the area was open to the public, so indeed anyone could have stumbled across you.”

 

“I suppose, but they would have had to try _very_ hard. They would have had to been watching me for a while.”

 

The jury murmured, and the lawyer just about suppressed a frown.

 

“Let's go back; you were staying overnight in a public area without your parent's knowledge. That's a fact you have in common with a lot of these missing women.”

 

“I suppose so.”

 

“Would you have said you were a _difficult_ child, Ms Pataki?”

 

“Depends on what you mean by difficult.”

 

“Well, I have some reports here....they use words like _hostile, uncommunicative, defiant, rude...._ I could go on. Would you agree with those statements?”

 

“To that person, then yes. Maybe.”

 

“You had a habit of hanging around older boys, am I right?”

 

Arnold heard Patrick, just behind him, suck in a breath.

 

“What do you mean by 'hanging around?'” Helga asked.

 

“You were often seen in the company of older boys.”

 

“I was on the baseball team with a lot of older boys, so yes, I guess.”

 

“But outside of baseball, you saw some of these boys socially.”

 

“Mostly just one, the others I saw in passing if we were all doing the same thing. I was the only girl on the team so they looked out for me.”

 

“Forgive me, but it's a rare kind of boy that wants to be in the company of a younger girl without getting something in return, would you agree?”

 

“Then I was lucky, because the ones I knew treated me like a younger sister. Maybe the boys you knew were different.”

 

A wave of soft laughter echoed in the courtroom. Red spots of annoyance popped up on the lawyer's cheeks.

 

“Still, running away and hanging out with older boys, that's not a usual thing for an eleven year old girl, is it Ms Pataki?” he prodded. “That combined with these reports suggests you were pretty troublesome back then. Is that fair to say?”

 

“I didn't realize having crappy parents was such a crime,” Helga quipped.

 

Now, the courtroom didn't attempt to suppress their amusement; they laughed openly. But when the laughter died down, one person was still loudly chuckling. All eyes in the room turned to him.

 

Curtis Waring.

He had been blank-faced throughout most of the proceedings, but now tears of laughter ran down his face. When the judge banged the gavel and commanded him to be quiet, he calmed down, wiped his eyes. And then he looked directly at Helga and mouthed three words to her.

 

_That's my girl._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	27. Chapter 27

 

 

 

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Twenty Seven**

 

Note: This chapter is coming in a little later than I would have liked. Unfortunately my health is quite poor at the moment so I'm on extended bed rest for a while, which gives me limited time for updating fics.

 

…..

 

The gauntlet of reporters that Arnold and Ambrose had had to go through at the start of the trial dwindled as the trial itself progressed. Journalists had cottoned on that, childhood friend and potential adoptive father though they were, they were pretty boring and didn't have anything to say.

 

Not to mention, if they wanted a _real_ story, that tended to happen at the courthouse itself.

 

Helga had been excused from testimony for a week after having a very dramatic nosebleed while on the stand. She had been explaining to Waring's lawyer for what must have been the tenth time at least what she was doing in the mountains, and the lawyer's repeated prodding brought him under fire for jeopardizing her health. A journo managed to catch a picture as she was being escorted out of the courthouse, clutching her forehead and a bloodstained handkerchief.

 

But the week was up, and one of the most crucial days evidence-wise was on the horizon. It was the day they'd reveal what had been found in the bunker, and Helga would be questioned about all the exhibits that related to her captivity. Arnold had no doubt that regardless of his reprimand, Waring's lawyer was going to rake her over the coals as much as he could.

 

_I can't protect her from this. Nobody can._

 

He knew Ambrose was worried, as were Helga's doctors at the hospital. Even Plaskett, gung-ho as he was to get Waring sent down, was rambling nervously right up until they went inside the courtroom.

 

“The judge will stop it if it gets too much,” he assured them. “He's on the lookout for 'stunts' right now, he'll stop it before it gets out of hand. Don't forget to let him know if you need a break.”

 

Helga shrugged and smiled. She seemed confident enough, but as always it was hard to tell what she was really thinking. Her hands gripped the arms of her wheelchair hard enough to make the metal creak.

 

…..

 

“Could you explain what this thing is supposed to be?”

 

The lawyer held up a clear plastic bag delicately between his fingers, as though he didn't want to touch it even indirectly. The metal ring inside winked under the harsh lighting of the courtroom.

 

“That would be my collar.”

 

A few quiet gasps sounded from the stands and the jury. Waring smiled, as though he was thinking on a pleasant memory.

 

“A collar?” the lawyer scoffed. “Forgive me, it doesn't look quite big enough to be a collar, Ms. Pataki.”

 

“It was made with my measurements, I was a lot smaller then.”

 

“I see. And what was this collar used for, exactly?”

 

“It attached to a chain on the wall. It was to stop me from trying to escape or wander out of sight,” she explained.

 

Helga's hand was fiddling with her hair as she spoke, but if you looked close enough you could see her trace the scar the collar had left on her neck.

 

“Let me go back to some of your previous testimony....as I recall, you said my client had you locked in a dog crate, is that right?”

 

“That's right.”

 

“So why would he feel the need to fit you with a collar and chain? Seems a little bit like overkill, wouldn't you agree?”

 

“As I explained then,” Helga said with the iciest of tones, “the crate was only used at night. He didn't like me wandering around the bunker while he was sleeping, that's why he locked me up. The collar and chain was for the daytime so I could stretch my legs and do chores.”

 

“Ah, please pardon my forgetfulness,” the lawyer said flippantly. “I assume you were locked up in this contraption the day you claimed to escape?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“So how did you get out of this thing? Because I can hardly believe even back when you were a child you'd manage to slip this over your head....”

 

“I dug an old nail out of the floorboard and used it to unscrew the hinge,” she told him. “I always put it back on before he came back.”

 

“Once you had it off, why didn't you make a run for it then?”

 

“I was too big to fit through the hole in the roof. I had to buy time to make it wider.”

 

“Forgive me for thinking that sounds quite fantastical, Ms. Pataki. Am I to believe a starving child, as you have described, had enough strength to widen a hole in metal using a single nail?”

 

“The roof was already rusting badly. It didn't take much. And my weight at the time is in my medical files, I was getting smaller as the hole was getting bigger.”

 

“Sounds plausible,” the lawyer agreed with an air of sarcasm.

 

He was clearly playing one of two goals; either he was trying to rapid-fire his questions to confuse Helga and make her contradict herself, or he was trying to spur her on to have another medical issue so he could claim she wasn't fit to give evidence. The prosecutor had warned them about this.

 

_Why can't the judge see what he's doing?_

 

“Moving on to Exhibit D,” the lawyer began, dropping the collar and picking up another plastic bag. “Do you recognize this?”

 

“Yes,” she answered, and from the stand Arnold could see her waver a little.

 

“This would be a standard set of pliers,” the lawyer continued. “Tell us what Mr Waring used these for.”

 

“Mostly fixing things, but he also used them to pull out two of my teeth,” Helga answered.

 

Arnold heard the journalists scribbling furiously in their notepads. The jury exchanged shocked looks. Apparently they hadn't heard of this before now.

 

“Do you mean to tell me Mr Waring performed some sort of field orthodontia on you?”

 

“He said they were crowded, and they were permanent teeth so he thought they needed to go.”

 

The lawyer looked back at Waring. Two spots of red were blooming on his cheeks, by now it was a clear sign that he was frustrated that his client had kept things from him.

 

“That's in my medical file too,” Helga said smoothly.

 

…..

 

One of the back rooms in the courthouse was set aside for vulnerable people there to give evidence, and although Helga snorted when she heard the word 'vulnerable' she was clearly glad to be as far from Waring as possible when they adjourned.

 

Arnold braved the reporter gauntlet to pick up some sandwiches from a diner across the street. When he returned, she was tapping awkwardly on the phone she had yet to figure out (having gone missing before smartphones became an everyday thing).

 

“Phoebe's asking how it's going,” she explained as he placed her sandwich (turkey and swiss cheese, wholemeal) in front of her.

 

“I'd say it's going pretty well,” Arnold suggested. “What do you think?”

 

“I don't know,” she sighed. “It feels like I'm just answering the same question over and over and we're getting nowhere.”

 

“Yeah, that lawyer's like a dog with a bone. Maybe it's because he knows he can't win so he's trying to drag it out.”

 

“You're probably right.”

 

She sank a little in her wheelchair, unwrapped her sandwich but made no move to eat it. She looked exhausted.

 

“How are you feeling?” Arnold asked cautiously, knowing she hated to show any sign of weakness. “Remember, they said don't push yourself...”

 

“Everything counts as pushing myself right now,” she snapped. “I can't remember any of this without effort, especially the stuff that'll get him sent down.”

 

The silence dragged after her outburst. Ambrose had been called away, it was just the two of them. Arnold wanted to help her somehow, but there was absolutely no way to do it. He'd just have to watch her suffer through this endless questioning.

 

“Sorry,” she muttered at last. “I'm kinda crabby...my head hurts a bit.”

 

“Nothing to be sorry for,” he shrugged. “I think if you weren't crabby in these circumstances, you wouldn't be human.”

 

That got a wan chuckle out of her, at least.

 

…..

 

“He used that on deer carcasses.”

 

She was sounding bored, and the jury seemed to be just as bored. The lawyer insisted that she recognize every single knife and tool they had removed from the bunker, and Waring had a vast collection.

 

“Just deer?” the lawyer probed.

 

“He may have used it for other carcasses, I'm not sure. I mostly saw him butcher deer with it.”

 

The lawyer dropped the knife, and turned back towards the evidence table. There were only a few more items on it, soon the day's questioning would be over....

 

“This notebook, do you recognize it?”

 

Arnold saw Helga stiffen dramatically. The jury, and the reporters at the back, took notice and started paying attention again.”

 

“Yes,” she said, swallowing hard.

 

“On inspection, it seems to be a list of numbers. Can you tell the court what these numbers indicate?”

 

She took a deep, shaky breath.

 

“The numbers are my measurements. _Were,_ I mean. He measured me every day,” she explained.

 

“To what end were these measurements taken?”

 

“He wanted me to grow a certain way,” she continued. “He put me on diets and gave me exercises to do while he was gone so I'd fit what he wanted. He said that's why he took a kid, he wanted to shape me into his perfect woman.”

 

“Perfect?”

 

“That's how he said it.”

 

“So he measured height, weight, waist, and so on? There are over fifty different number categories here.”

 

“He measured everything. Inside and out.”

 

“Do you mean to say that my client sexually molested you in the process of taking these measurements?”

 

“Yes, he did.”

 

Several members of the jury had gone noticeably pale. If Helga kept this up, it would be a slam dunk verdict. The nausea that Arnold felt listening to this was a small price to pay for taking Waring out of society and behind bars.

 

Even the lawyer was looking a little shaken as he dropped the notebook and unwrapped a long object from its dustcloth. It was a shotgun, covered in plastic wrap.

 

“Do you recognize this, Ms Pataki?” he asked.

 

Helga looked up at the judge, but she might as well have been looking at a statue for all the response she got from him.

 

“It's his shotgun,” she said.

 

“Do you know what type of gun this is?”

 

“No, I don't really know anything about guns.”

 

“Then how can you say without a doubt that this belongs to my client?”

 

“It's his deer gun,” Helga explained. “It has a smear of blue paint on the barrel and a crack in the base. The bullets come in a red and white box.”

 

“Did you handle this gun at any point yourself?”

 

“Sometimes he got me to polish it,” she said. “And sometimes he pointed it at me.”

 

“Any particular reason, do you think?”

 

“When I wasn't doing things fast enough for him, or if my measurements were wrong. He fired it at me twice, the first time he was aiming near my feet. The second time he got me.”

 

“This would be the alleged bullet wound on your head, is that correct?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“The one that put you in a coma, am I right?”

 

“Coma isn't the right word. The doctors say it was a persistent vegetative state. But yes, that's the one.”

 

There was an air of finality when she confirmed the head wound, Arnold was sure she couldn't answer another question without collapsing. She was white as a sheet now and visibly trembling. But her job had been done, there was no way they wouldn't convict Waring.

 

Even if Waring hadn't opened his mouth again and shouted across the courtroom, ignoring everybody else, as if he and Helga were the only two people there.

 

“It worked, didn't it? You have to admit it worked!”

 

An apelike chattering laugh bubbled in his throat, he stretched his arms out towards her and suddenly lurched across the bench before he could be stopped.

 

“You're perfect now,” he bellowed. “If I'd known that was all it took, I'd have shot you sooner!”

 

Arnold was on his feet rushing to the stand as the bailiff tackled Waring to the ground, but it was far too late. Blood was gushing out of Helga's nose and she tried in vain to staunch the flow with her hands wrapped around her face. Just as Arnold reached her, her eyes rolled back in her head and she passed out.

 

 

 

 

 

 


	28. Chapter 28

**Missing**

 

Chapter Twenty Seven

 

Note: Please excuse the long absence, a combination of being metaphysically hit by the fandom feels and being hit by actually physical issues with my crumbling bones interfered with my ability to write this chapter. I'm still pretty unwell but I'm going to catch up on all of my fics this month hopefully.

 

 

…..

 

Waring's lawyer tried to argue for an insanity plea, but it was rejected. There was no doubt he was insane, but functional enough to kill so many women and keep a kidnapped child hidden for nearly half a year. He was given three consecutive life sentences, narrowly avoiding the death penalty because there was limited proof that he had killed the missing women. The prosectution was quoted as saying that without Helga's testimony he might have walked away.

 

That was some consolation during the week she spent in an induced coma followed by an intense surgery to relieve some of the pressure on her brain. The nosebleeds had been a herald of something that could easily have killed her, and there was still no telling what effect it would have on her long-term. When she came to after surgery, she couldn't speak and had trouble moving her arms.

 

It was depressing, Arnold had to admit. She had come so far he had pretty much assumed it could only get better, even though he'd been warned multiple times she could slide back like this. He was lying on his bed at home, staring at the ceiling and wallowing in his unhappiness, when his phone pinged.

 

It was Phoebe, of course, because she was the only person who really texted him.

 

_**Arnold, you might want to** _

_**come down to the hospital.** _

 

_Why? What's up?_

 

He had that sinking feeling it was going to be bad news.

 

_**She's talking again and** _

_**she seems okay, but she's** _

_**acting strange.** _

 

_Strange in what way?_

 

_**I don't know how to** _

_**explain it properly** _

_**over text.** _

 

_Can you at least try?_

 

_**She thinks she's dead, Arnold.** _

 

_What? How?_

 

_**I don't know, apparently** _

_**it's something that happens.** _

_**I don't know what to do.** _

 

_Is she being treated for it?_

 

_**We're waiting on the psychiatrist,** _

_**they probably won't get one until** _

_**tomorrow. I'm trying to act** _

_**normal but it's really hard.** _

 

_Is there a way to act_

_normal in this situation?_

 

_**This is why you need to** _

_**be here, Arnold. She** _

_**remembers what we did** _

_**when she was a ghost.** _

 

_What?_

 

_**Just get down here when** _

_**you can, okay?** _

 

…..

 

When he finally made it to the hospital (Ambrose was away getting some things sorted with his estate and so couldn't drive him) Phoebe had left. Helga's main doctor caught him in the corridor before he could go into Helga's room.

 

“Cotard delusion,” the doctor sighed, as if that explained anything. “It's not uncommon with brain injury. At least she's not self-harming or suicidal, she's taking it pretty well.”

 

“But...she thinks she's dead?” Arnold wondered.

 

“Specifically, she thinks she's a ghost,” the doctor explained. “And she's kind of upbeat about it. Most Cotard patients are manic or depressed or a combo of both. All things considered, it's not a bad result.”

 

Arnold wondered sourly how Helga suddenly believing she had died wasn't a bad result, but he supposed that was what separated the doctor from the normal civilian. She didn't die or become a vegetable after surgery, which technically meant it was a success.

 

She was scribbling something in her newest pink notebook when Arnold entered the room, but shut it hastily when she realized he was there.

 

“Thank God,” she muttered darkly. “Someone sensible.”

 

“Sensible?” Arnold laughed. “Are you sure about that?”

 

“Depends on what words come out of your mouth in the next few sentences,” Helga quipped. “Apparently everyone can see me now. At least here in the hospital anyway...”

 

“Well, yeah they can see you,” Arnold chuckled awkwardly. “You're alive.”

 

“God, not you too,” she groaned, flopping back against the pillow. “Phoebe already tried this, I know I'm dead. Don't try to sugarcoat it.”

 

“Why do you think you're dead?”

 

“I got shot,” she shrugged, seemingly without a care. “We found out that much. Who survives getting shot in the head?”

 

“You did,” he pressed. “The bullet just grazed you, the medical records prove this. Why do you think the nurses and doctors are treating you, if you're dead?”

 

“They don't believe in ghosts,” Helga answered. “It's easier to believe I'm just some sick kid that needs treatment. I suppose if I was going to manifest somewhere besides your house it would be the hospital I died in.”

 

It made a crazy sort of sense, at least from her perspective.

 

_Maybe I should play along, at least until the psychiatrist can come to treat her._

 

“Okay, fine,” he shrugged, trying to put on a casual face. “You're dead. Did anyone tell you the guy who shot you got three life sentences?”

 

“Yes, everyone who's come to see me since I manifested,” she said. “And now you. Good. Let him rot in there.”

 

“So we did what we set out to do, we found out what happened to you.”

 

“Guess so.”

 

“What now? If you were a ghost, wouldn't you have moved on after we solved the case?”

 

“I don't know,” she moaned. “I'm not some sort of authority on ghosts.”

 

“Well then, it looks like you're here to stay,” Arnold said agreeably. “You're still welcome to haunt the boarding house.”

 

“I might just do that,” she said, smiling warmly.

 

An idea suddenly struck Arnold.

 

“I'm just going to find something,” he told her, getting up from his chair. “Oh, and I should talk to your doctor...”

 

“About what?”

 

“If I find it, I'll tell you.”

 

He hurried off to find the nurse's lounge. After asking a few of them, he found one with a bike she was willing to lend him and it had a basket on the handlebars (smaller than the one on his own but that didn't matter. He okayed it with the doctors, as long as he kept her warm and didn't stay out too long he was able to take her out. Rushing back to her room, he bundled her into her wheelchair and wheeled her out to the front of the hospital, where the nurse had propped up the bike waiting for them.

 

“Even ghosts need some fresh air,” he explained, lifting her into the basket he'd lined with pillows.

 

He took her out through one of the rarely-used country roads, bumpy and rough as it was the air was so clear and crisp and fragrant with the scent of blossoming fruit trees. She laughed wildly as they skittered over potholes and bumps in the road and didn't seem to mind that her bare feet were getting splattered with mud. Arnold's arms and legs ached with the strain of pushing the bike through the rocky terrain but it was worth it to see her so happy.

 

The bare patch of skin on her hairline where the bullet had struck her was covered by gauze since her surgery, but it brought back memories of hauling her ghost form around in his bike like this. Back then, he had come to terms, at least a little, with her death. He was more fearful now that she was living, that things could go wrong and she could be snatched away again. At least as a ghost, nobody would be able to hurt her.

 

Maybe that's why she believed herself to be dead; for protection.

 

…..

 

“I'll be going now,” Gertie told Arnold, kicking him out of his half-sleep.

 

“No, Grandma,” he groaned, rolling over in bed. “You don't have anywhere to be.”

 

She was wearing her coat but no shoes. Keeping shoes on her was the hardest task, even if she didn't leave the boarding house she seemed to lose her shoes within minutes of putting them on. Arnold brought her downstairs, took her coat and put some slippers on her feet. Phil was already at the breakfast table, frowning at some bills.

 

“Everything all right, Pookie?” he asked when Gertie sat down.

 

She didn't say anything but mumbled to herself a little. She was irritable these days, the new medication made her groggy and confused.

 

“I'll get started on breakfast,” Arnold offered.

 

Phil grunted in response and went back to scanning his bills.

 

A spike of resentment fired up in Arnold as he took out the ingredients to feed everyone in the boarding house. It was the weekend, and he should have had less work to do since Ambrose had started more or less renovating the building, but he'd found himself taking over his grandmother's old jobs instead. He appreciated Phil's money worries, but would it kill him to say thank you?

 

Other teenagers had the luxury of rebellion. Arnold didn't even have enough time to himself to get an ill-advised tattoo.

 

“Hey Arnold,” Ambrose said, leading Della into the kitchen. He was a naturally early riser. “On breakfast duty today?”

 

“Guess so,” Arnold shrugged.

 

“I'm going down to the hospital later. You wanna hop in?”

 

“Sure,” Arnold agreed. “Any news from the doctors?”

 

“They say another month and she should be good to come home,” Ambrose told him. “She has to be monitored by a home visitor but that's no big thing...and I almost got the ramp finished.”

 

Finally. They'd be living under the same roof. Helga remembered the things they did when she was a ghost, and at some point the Cotard delusion would fade.

 

_She kissed me back. I know she did. It's not just me._

 

Once the scrambled eggs he cooked were ready, he piled them onto a platter, buttered enough toast to feed an army and brought both into the dining room.

 

“Ambrose is giving me a lift to the hospital,” he told Phil. “I should be back around ten or...”

 

“What?” Phil snapped, dropping his bills for probably the first time all morning. “No, I need you here.”

 

“I don't have any homework,” Arnold shrugged, that little resentful spike pricking him deep. “And the boiler's fixed, Ambrose finished up last night...”

 

“There's a pile of laundry higher than the kitchen door,” Phil retorted. “None of the floors have been vacuumed in a week and there's weeds all over the garden. Now I've been patient with this hospital business as long as you kept up with your chores...”

 

“Chores?” Arnold snorted. “Chores are cleaning your room and taking turns with the dishes, not doing laundry for an entire apartment building of adults!”

 

“Watch it,” Phil growled. “This is your home, you're as responsible for it as I am.”

 

“No, I'm not,” Arnold growled back. “I didn't _choose_ to live here and I sure as hell never agreed to _work_ here. You've had me doing what should be _your job_ since I was six, you pay me next to nothing for the work I do, you ruined my social life and you're _killing my future!”_

 

Arnold hadn't realized but his voice had been climbing in volume, and now there was a line of awkward lodgers standing in the hall, not wanting to come in for breakfast. Phil looked shocked, the bills crumpled in his hands, two bright mortified spots on his cheeks. Even Ambrose and Della back in the kitchen had gone silent.

 

“Well,” Phil said at last. “If that's how you feel....you know where the door is.”

 

That just made Arnold even angrier. Over the years Arnold had been such a good kid, never given either of his grandparents any trouble, never even been caught smoking or taking a few dollars from a wallet or ditching school. And this was what he got for a lifetime of good behavior.

 

“Yes, I do,” he said as he stomped past the lodgers to the front door.

 


	29. Chapter 29

**Missing**

 

**Chapter Twenty Eight**

 

Note: This chapter, without going into too many spoilers, is going to have a mild R rating, you can read or not read at your own discretion. It's not considerably more graphic than anything I've written within this fic before, but I know this can be an issue for people reading work about characters that are underage (although, for my part, the age of consent in my country is 16 so I don't personally feel it's an issue for me.) This is also going to be one of the last, as I'm wrapping up this story. I may write drabbles within the same universe but I'm also thinking of going in a completely different direction. Thanks for sticking with me so far.

 

…..

 

Arnold had 25 dollars in his pocket when he left the boarding house. It was enough to get him a bus ticket to Pocaselas, a connecting ticket for Warleybridge and an undercooked burger from the bus station diner, but by the time he reached the outskirts of Warleybridge he had nothing left for a room in the motel he'd been staying in on previous visits. It was getting dark, he'd already spent most of the day traveling and visiting hours at the hospital were long over.

 

Knowing he'd probably get stopped at the door, he continued on foot to the hospital. On the way he mentally cursed himself for being so impulsive; he could at least have grabbed some of his stuff, or called Phoebe and asked her to put him up for a while. He'd have to go back eventually, if only to pack up his things and gather whatever money he had to find somewhere else to live.

 

_Helga's moving in there in less than a month._

 

Still, he couldn't continue with things as they were. He was exhausted, the extent of his social life was visiting an invalid with whatever little free time he had, his schoolwork was suffering so badly getting into college was going to be difficult, and even if by some miracle he did get in he'd have to turn it down unless it was close enough to the boarding house to let him stay there most of the time.

 

Really, Phil should have expected Arnold to rebel a lot sooner.

 

The hospital was pretty dark when he arrived; the emergency department was well lit but nearly empty, and all the nurses were sitting either in the lounge or behind the triage desk, watching something on their smartphones. They barely looked up when Arnold walked past.

 

Helga was asleep when he entered her room. A set of three origami cranes sitting on the windowsill let him know that Ambrose had been there and left again. One of the fake fur blankets Rhonda had gifted her was draped over the thin hospital sheet.

 

“Hm?...Arnold?”

 

Groggy and confused, she stared at him through the dimly lit room. Arnold cursed under his breath.

 

“Yeah, it's me,” he whispered. “Sorry, go back to sleep, I didn't mean to wake you...”

 

“Go back to...what are you doing here?”

“Ssh, I'll tell you in the morning, go back to sleep. I'll go find somewhere else to go...”

 

Too late, now she was very much awake. She sat up and turned on the lamp beside her bed.

 

“Don't be ridiculous,” she said, sleep making her voice husky in a not unpleasant way. “How did you get here?”

 

“I took the bus,” Arnold sighed, sitting in the chair beside her bed. “It got in pretty late.”

 

“Why didn't you get a lift with Ambrose?”

 

“Yeah, well...I'm surprised he didn't tell you...I had a pretty big fight with Grandpa and I sort of walked out...”

 

“About what?” she asked, frowning.

 

“About me spending so much time here,” Arnold answered. “He thinks I should be helping out more at the boarding house...I mean, it's not like we haven't had this argument before...”

 

Saying it out loud, it sounded petty, especially considering who he was saying it to. A teenage temper tantrum over what he was doing with his free time was nothing compared to being chained to a wall and shot in the head by a serial killer. Still, the look she gave him was sympathetic.

 

“You do more than he should expect,” she said. “I mean, he's lucky to have you. Any other kid would have told him where to go long before now.”

 

“Yeah, but I guess I can see where he's coming from,” Arnold sighed. “They don't really have anyone else...”

 

“That's not your problem,” Helga reminded me. “Parents shouldn't throw their kids under the bus because of adult problems.”

 

She was speaking from bitter experience. Arnold's problem felt even pettier.

 

“I'll work it out, I shouldn't be bothering you with this,” he said.

 

“You're not bothering me.”

 

“What else would you call turning up at your hospital bed at nearly midnight with a tale of woe?”

 

“I dunno...presumptuous?”

 

They shared a soft laugh, so as not to wake up anyone else in the nearby rooms or alert the nurses. Helga pulled back the covers of the bed and invited him in, and as it was getting cold he accepted.

 

“So how are you today?” he asked when he was settled beside her. “Still feeling dead?”

 

“Hm, it's hard to describe,” she answered. “It's like...intellectually, I know I'm alive. I have the charts to prove it. But it still feels wrong.”

 

“Wrong how?” he asked, frowning at her head pillowed on his shoulder.

 

“Well, it's like....” she trailed off, lacing her fingers together. “Like my body doesn't belong to me. Like it's not moving because _I'm_ doing it, it's under someone else's control. I don't know.”

 

“What does your doctor say?”

 

“He says it'll pass, in time.”

 

There was nothing that could be done to help her feel more secure in herself, but Arnold pressed a kiss to the crown of her head anyway, hoping it would bring some measure of comfort.

 

It wasn't _supposed_ to go any further than that.

 

But when she turned a little to look up at him, he found himself putting his mouth on hers. It happened organically, like he was pulled by a magnet. When she opened her mouth to allow him better access, and shifted so he was lying on top of her, it felt natural. Like it was supposed to happen.

 

He was holding her shoulders, but his hands trailed down along her sides to press his fingers into her firm flesh. Through her thin nightgown, he was very aware that she wasn't wearing a bra. Her chest was pressed flush against his. A pressure began to build at his groin, in anticipation.

 

She took a deep, shuddering breath when their mouths broke free, and his lips trailed down her jaw to fix on the pulse at her throat, alternately sucking at and licking it to savour the rhythmic beat of her heart.

 

“You're alive,” he whispered between kisses. “I can feel you.”

 

Distantly, he was afraid he was coming on too strong, even has his fingers reached the hem of her nightgown and began pushing it over her thighs. But she seemed as eager as he was, her thighs opened to let him settle between them. One word from her and he would stop, he knew. One sign of hesitation and he would tear himself away.

 

Instead, a satisfied moan built in her throat and she used her legs to pull him closer to her, until he was practically grinding on her. She wanted this as much as he did.

 

He pulled back, not really thinking about it but with a vague idea to take off his pants and her nightgown fully, but when he did all arousal was chased away.

 

When she was a ghost, the wound running across her stomach, along her ribcage and under her breast was fresh-looking, and unreal because he knew she was a spirit. Now, on the living, breathing, flesh-and-blood girl it was faded but an angry splash of colour on her otherwise pale skin. It swelled away from the surrounding skin, a jagged reminder that someone had hurt her so badly she was dead for five long years.

 

He tried to look past it, to focus on her bare breasts sitting so prettily above the scar or the small trace of wiry golden hair peeking from the edge of her panties, and in any other circumstances those would have been powerfully erotic.

 

Instead, his finger reached out to trace the uneven ridges of the scar. Confused, she blinked up at him but she didn't try to stop him. At least, until he started sobbing and couldn't stop.

 

_It's not fair. She doesn't deserve this. It's not fair._

 

With a mildly frustrated sigh, she pulled down her nightgown, closed her legs and pulled him down to her. She readjusted their bodies until his head was resting on her chest. She let him cry there until, at some point, he fell into a drained sleep.

 

…..

 

The next morning, it took him a little while to recall where he was and why. When he remembered what exactly had happened the night before, he was mortified.

 

“I'm really sorry,” he apologized when Helga came back from her physiotherapy. “I don't know what came over me...”

 

“It's all right,” she shrugged, oddly casual about it even as his face burned.

 

“No, really,” he continued. “I took advantage...”

 

“Arnold, stop. You're going to give yourself a coronary,” she laughed gently. “If you're going to apologize, maybe apologize for implying that looking at me naked makes guys cry.”

 

“It's not that, you're beautiful...” he stammered.

 

“Thanks.”

 

“I just...when I saw what he did to you....”

 

“He didn't do that to me,” she told him. “I got that wound escaping him. So really, it's a badge of honour, kind of.”

 

“Oh,” Arnold muttered. Now he felt _twice_ as bad for crying.

 

“More importantly,” Helga said, climbing awkwardly from her chair to bed without assistance, “ _why_ did you do it? And I don't mean the crying.”

 

“Isn't it obvious?” Arnold replied. “Because I'm in love with you.”

 

She frowned, twisted the fabric of her blanket in her hands.

 

“Are you sure about that? What if you just feel sorry for me?”

 

“I don't feel _that_ sorry for you,” he laughed. “I think you'd be angry if I pitied you at all. You don't pity yourself.”

 

She hummed to herself, refused to meet his eyes.

 

“I admire you,” Arnold continued. “For surviving all of this, not everyone could. You're the bravest person I know. But it's not just that...when you were gone, you left a hole behind. I was a stupid kid then, but even then I knew I didn't just miss you because you were my friend.”

 

Now she was looking at him, and although they didn't fall he could see tears glittering faintly at the edge of her eyes.

 

“I spent five years trying to find out what happened to you. I don't think I could have done that if I wasn't at least a little bit in love with you.”

 

She sniffled, and Arnold looked down at his lap. Whatever happened next, it had the power to make his life worthwhile or ruin it entirely.

 

“I suppose what I want to know,” he began, fidgeting nervously, “is if you have any feelings for me. I mean, you said before when you were a ghost that it couldn't happen, but it's different now.”

 

“Are you kidding me?” she answered, choking back her tears. “You know. You _have_ to know!”

 

All at once, the weight lifted from his soul. He did know.

 

Deep down, he always had.

 

…..

 

When she was finally released from hospital, Ambrose came to pick her up and Arnold went with him.

 

He had gone back to the boarding house after being gone for nearly two days, and talked things over with Phil. He had spent a long time discussing what he was going to say with Helga's help, and although Phil still wasn't happy they had come to an arrangement that was much more fair. Arnold was going to stay at the boarding house after graduation until he turned nineteen, and then he could go to college. It would give Phil time to find someone else to help out.

 

Although Helga was better able to walk unaided now, she still tired easily and required her wheelchair for long distances. Her rooms were close to the kitchen, and after school Arnold often found her there chopping vegetables or doing dishes with his grandmother, listening to her long rambling nonsensical stories with a polite nod.

 

She had a slew of visitors, kids from their old elementary class mostly with a few small-time journalists and well-wishers, and these well-wishers sometimes rented the spare rooms in the boarding house on a short term basis to complete their write-ups. The boarding house could finally afford to retile the roof with this extra money, a task Ambrose completed over a single weekend without breaking a sweat.

 

They spent time together whenever they could; engineering makeout sessions was difficult when she couldn't climb stairs and Ambrose was almost always home. Arnold took to sneaking out of the fire escape and crawling through the window, pockets full of dog biscuits to keep Della quiet.

 

After that first careless night, they decided against going beyond some light foreplay. Helga couldn't take birth control that interfered with the slew of medications she was taking, and Arnold didn't want to risk used condoms being found by someone. It meant they were often left frustrated and awkward, but it was better than nothing.

 

All the while, Arnold had the feeling Ambrose knew something was going on. He had this way of looking at Arnold that made him feel like he was under an x-ray.

 

_Is he going to be one of those dads that gives me a speech about not hurting her or he'll shoot me?_

 

Luckily, when Ambrose confirmed that he more or less did know what was going on, it was considerably less violent but much more embarrassing.

 

“I reckon you dropped something, Arnold,” he said as Arnold was leaving his flat, after supposedly 'checking the pipes.'

 

Arnold turned and scooped up the object Ambrose was gesturing to. He didn't look at it properly until he got upstairs.

 

It was Helga's bra.

 


	30. Chapter 30

**Missing**

 

**Epilogue**

 

Note: So we've finally come to the end of this fic, I think it's the fastest length of time I've ever finished up a fanwork and it's been quite a journey. I'd like to give my thanks to all the readers who have followed up to now, your reviews and support have been a boon to my self-esteem and a critical part of getting this work made. I don't intend for this to be the only fiction I have in the HA fandom, I have another longform in the works but I may need a week or two to get it underway.

 

I've also made an archive for all of my written work recently, including my original stuff, so if you were interested you could find that here:

 

Link: <https://ptlikestea.dreamwidth.org/>

 

…..

 

Eventually, Arnold had to have that incredibly awkward conversation with Helga's one remaining parental figure who actually gave a damn about her as to what they were getting up to in private. Luckily, Ambrose wasn't the shotgun-toting type of retired cowboy and he had fond memories of his own indiscretions with boys in his youth.

 

“Hell, if it were any other boy I might be worried,” he had said with a casual shrug. “But it's you so....you're a good kid, Arnold. I trust you to do right by her.”

 

His later conversation with his Grandpa was slightly less awkward, if only because Phil was gradually chilling out with regards to Arnold's comings and goings and he was still benefiting from Ambrose's presence in the boarding house.

 

“She seems like a sensible girl,” he reasoned. “Maybe she can keep you on the straight and narrow...”

 

Phoebe's response was a deadpan look and a mumbled 'no shit, Sherlock.'

 

Once they've told all the most important people, and stopped sneaking around, the boarders are happy for them. Even if Helga hadn't been the oh-so-brave survivor of a serial killer, they are fond of her for her snappy wit and take-no-prisoners attitude. She watches sports with the men on weekends, the only girl brave enough to endure that heady mix of raised testosterone and beer-induced bravado, and chats with the women in the kitchen in the evenings, spiking the atmosphere with cackling laughter. When Arnold's at school she helps out with whatever chores she can manage and she studies with him every night to take her high school equivalency exam.

 

Her presence in the boarding house is a leavening one; she freely offers money raised for her (and there's no shortage of that) to pay for the repairs the house needs, anything Ambrose can't do himself she can afford to bring in outside help for. The result is that Phil is able to breathe easy for the first time in years, and he is more relaxed about what Arnold does with his time. She's a calming influence on Gertie, and the boarders are less likely to complain about things when they have to say it to her.

 

The slew of outside visitors slows to a trickle; there's still the occasional journalist, podcast presenter and human interest blogger, but overall they've moved on since Waring's conviction. With the disappearance of the press, a lot of their old friends climb out of the woodwork.

 

At first, it's just Gerald stopping Arnold in the street to ask how she's doing. Rhonda making an offhand comment at school about something she read online that's useful for mobility-impaired people. Eugene dropping a note through Arnold's locker to say he was thinking about her, about them, since by now the entire school knows Helga lives in Arnold's house.

 

“Do you think she's going to come back to school?” Sid asked after grilling Arnold for about ten minutes for the gory details he thinks he missed out on.

 

“I doubt it,” Arnold answered. “She's missed too much time...she's taking her high school equivalency though.”

 

“Oh.”

 

Sid seemed unexpectedly crestfallen by that answer, and he walked away in a slump.

 

Even Harold, as unpleasant as he had become over the last few years, seemed to grow an actual heart when it came to Helga. When one of his lackeys shouted an obscene question (something about Helga being able to do something with her bad leg) over at Arnold, Harold punched him in the eye and hissed something in his ear that Arnold couldn't hear, but was likely some sort of threat. Then he nodded in Arnold's direction, an acknowledgment more than an apology.

 

“I don't think I have to tell you I'll beat the crap out of you if you hurt her, right?” had been Patrick's response.

 

“Didn't you just tell me now?” Arnold asked.

 

“Good point. So remember that.”

 

…..

 

Over time, Helga becomes less dependent on the wheelchair and can walk around more, and she has no shortage of people willing to drive her anywhere she wants to go, but her favourite mode of transport (and Arnold's too) is sitting in the basket of his bike. It's worth the sore muscles he gets and the stiffness in her back and bad leg she gets.

 

It's during one of these bike rides that they lose their virginities to each other. It wasn't planned, but between taking a pothole too hard and needing to take a break in a nearby field, the nice weather, the fact that her sundress was very, very thin and him needing to take his shirt off to cool down from pushing the bike, it was a perfect storm of circumstances.

 

They started off simply making out under a tree but got carried away, and all under the watchful gaze of a nearby herd of cows. It definitely couldn't be described as mind-blowing sex, and it was awkward as hell getting dressed afterwards and cycling away. There was then the nail-biting experience of waiting to see if that one fumble had gotten her pregnant, but luckily it hadn't. They made the decision then that Arnold was going to start carrying condoms around and she was going to get on birth control as soon as it was medically safe to do so.

 

Nearly a year after the ghost first showed up in Arnold's house and everything that followed, a candid picture of them went viral. They were cycling down a hill, his open shirt billowing behind him like a very odd cape, her long bare legs dangling out of the basket. Her head is thrown back, caught mid-laugh, because Arnold had leaned forward and whispered some joke he couldn't even remember in her ear, and he is smiling as if he'd just won some sort of prize.

 

The picture is heavily discussed on social media, and although Helga rolls her eyes at the idea of reading any of the comments, Arnold can't help himself from surreptitiously combing over them when she's in bed.

 

_Look at his face! He's like a goddamn puppy, I swear to god._

 

_Didn't that Waring guy break her legs so she couldn't escape? You can kinda see, they bend a bit funny at the ankles._

 

_That's a genuine laugh, you can't fake that. This is so sweet._

 

_She's hot. Lucky bastard._

 

_D'aww, I'm happy for them. He seems so nice._

 

… _.._

 

It's not perfect. Nothing ever is.

 

She has her bad days, and they are _really_ bad. She has days where she can't stand to let anyone touch her, especially Arnold. She has days when she wakes up and doesn't seem to know who he is. She has days where her headaches are so severe her nose bleeds and she goes straight to bed, to hell with any plans they might have made.

 

The scars on her stomach, ankles and the crown of her head ache whenever there's a storm on the horizon, and the medication she takes to combat the after-effects of severe brain injury sometimes cause vomiting, loss of sensation and confusion. Every now and then she'll suddenly lose her balance and tilt off alarmingly to the side, and whoever's nearby needs to react fast before she hits the ground.

 

She flinches at loud noises, and will not use a knife any bigger than a steakknife even if it means trying to saw through a butternut squash for an hour. She hates the taste of meat and cannot eat anything that's mixed up, so no curries, chili or gumbo. She has to eat methodically, left to right, and her self-imposed food restrictions mean she has to take a small bucket of nutritional supplements along with her other pills. She cannot have anything press against her neck for more than a few seconds, even if that something is a winter scarf, and although she has been offered free dental surgery to fix the issues with her jaw caused by her pulled teeth, she cannot accept it because she still can't bear the thought of anything poking around in there.

 

She sees a therapist on a regular basis, and has inpatient check-ups at the hospital, but even with these measures she has days where she is so angry she cannot speak to anyone without snapping (even if she apologizes later, mortified and full of remorse) and days where she can't stop bursting into tears. Even worse, there are days where she goes 'dead' for a while and doesn't leave her bed, doesn't eat, doesn't talk, doesn't do anything but stare at the wall.

 

Arnold frets, always, but Ambrose always assures him that it will pass.

 

“Every day she'll get a bit better,” he says. “Just give her some space.”

 

He's right, of course.

 

…..

 

Arnold graduates, with his grandparents, Helga, Ambrose and half of the boarding house in attendance. The valedictorian mentions Helga in his speech, saying that it's not fair that she never got to graduate with them but that she was in all of their hearts. They go out to dinner with Phoebe and her parents afterwards, and the relief in Phoebe's parents eyes that their daughter recovered from her own despondency in time to graduate with full honours is palpable.

 

A week later, Helga passes her high school equivalency and graduates herself. They celebrate at home this time, and Plaskett and her ER doctor attend to give her their best wishes. There's a small write-up in the local paper about it.

 

Two days later, she gets a notably subdued letter of congratulations from Olga. (Who had been invited, but hadn't responded at the time.)

 

College is out of the question; although she could have her pick based on her exam scores, and she could afford just about any of them, there's hardly a college in the country that's set up for her complex needs. She takes a home study course in Social Work, with the idea to some day pursue a career helping kids in similar circumstances to the one she had grown up with.

 

Arnold defers college for a year, but he already knows he wants to run the boarding house. A year before he might have balked at the idea, but with Helga living there it feels more like somewhere he wants to be. He has changes he wants to make, maybe turn the front of the house into some sort of small home business, but ultimately what he really wants is to support Helga in whatever way he can because he knows her future is going to be very bright.

 

During his first year of college, Helga is approached by three ghostwriters wanting to tell her story, but she turns them down and decides to write her own story. According to Ambrose, she works on it most of the day until he interrupts her to bring her food or tell her to get some sleep, and although she stops when Arnold comes home he still hears her typing away furiously after she thinks he's asleep.

 

When the finished book hits the shelves, it's an instant hit. Helga has a distinct flair for words, and it's described as 'harrowing yet poetic' and 'a lyrical tale of triumph over adversity' by critics. It's only by picking up the book himself and reading it that he discovers that Helga has nursed an intense love for him since she was a kindergartner, and although he always knew there was something there the sheer force of it leaves him speechless.

 

Whole chapters of the book are dedicated to him, to the point that people are actively messaging him about it and he has no idea what to say. He thought his own feelings for Helga were powerful, but apparently they were just a trickle of what she felt for him.

 

“I feel kind of dumb,” he mumbles to her when he talks to her about it, red-faced and awkward. “That I didn't notice before. I'm sorry.”

 

“Sorry for what?” she shrugs. “I went out of my way to keep it from you. You couldn't have known.”

 

“Yeah, I guess,” he sighs. “It's just....I don't know, I feel like I should have picked up on it. The book makes it sound like you suffered with it...”

 

“I was already suffering,” she shrugs again. “And I needed an outlet. Falling in love kept me sane, I think.”

 

On the talk shows she gets invited to, the host asks about Arnold and she always ends up gushing just a little bit, despite herself. Arnold watches out of solidarity but he has to leave the room, blushing like crazy, every time his name is mentioned.

 

…..

 

During Arnold's final year of college, Gertie passes away.

 

Her health had been failing for a long time, but when she goes she is at home, surrounded by her family and comfortable. It's a death they should all be so lucky to have.

 

Phil is alternately devastated and relieved. He loved his wife with the utmost devotion since the day they married, but it was hell watching her decline. In the aftermath he is quieter, and he seems older. Ambrose takes over most of his work in the boarding house, aided by Helga. By now they don't really even need to take in boarders as Helga's book is providing a steady income and shows no signs of stopping.

 

Arnold finishes college with a decent degree and takes over the running from Ambrose. Despite himself he is happy to be back, and he deals with the boarders as firmly and efficiently as Phil ever did. Helga's schedule is hectic, between continuing medical appointments, surgery on her ankle to give her better stability, a proposed international book tour and publishers interested in the many volumes of poetry she has in storage (leaked by some unknown source, probably Phoebe) he's amazed she has any time for him at all.

 

She makes time for him, no matter what. Even if it means putting the phone down on deals that could make her very wealthy.

 

Just before she turns twenty-four, she testifies at her father's parole board. He had already gotten parole once but violated it by speaking to the press about his daughter (in an interview that was then removed due to a huge backlash, considering it said some awful things about the child victim of a serial killer). She tells the court bluntly that she would never have had to endure being locked in a dog cage, having her teeth pulled out and been shot in the head if her father hadn't decided to sell obscene pictures of her to save his failing business. She suggested that he would do it all over again, knowing what would happen, if he could.

 

Parole is denied, and that is the last time Helga ever hears from her sister.

 

Phil is ninety-nine years old when he dies, just a handful of days from his one hundredth birthday. He goes quietly in his sleep, with a gentle smile. Perhaps he knew he was going to where his wife was. Though he always knew this day would come, and he was always destined to lose his parental figures at a young age, Arnold takes it hard. He is lost for the best part of a month, so upset he can't find the energy to shower, eat or even sleep.

 

Helga and Ambrose get him through it all. Ambrose takes care of all the technicalities, and Helga deals with the mourners, screens them before she lets them get anywhere near Arnold. Oskar has resurfaced after hearing of Phil's death, and it's the first time he sees his own little daughter in person, but Helga gets rid of him early on when it becomes clear he's only there to see if he can sponge some money off of Phil's estate somehow.

 

In the aftermath, as he slowly recovers, Arnold decides he needs to propose. He can't imagine his life without her now.

 

They don't have to get married right away. They can be engaged for a few years, let her write her books and go on world tours and come home to him waiting for her. When she's ready to settle down, they can think about having children. She's cagey about that, he knows, she's not sure if she can be a good parent when she didn't have a good parent to show her, but Ambrose more than makes up for Miriam and Bob Pataki's shortcomings, and he knows it's just like her to do the opposite of what they had done just to spite them.

 

They can raise their children in the boarding house, with or without any boarders. If they're lucky, she supposes, they'll have Arnold's kindness and green eyes. If they're lucky, he supposes, they'll have Helga's wicked smile and pure strength.

 

…..

 

Helga's fifth book is about the ghost of a murdered girl manifesting in the house of her elementary school crush. It's a worldwide bestseller, is optioned for a movie within a year and has young Hollywood actresses clawing at each other to get the lead part.

 

Helga gets to accept the best screenplay award at the Oscars that year. Arnold and their three-year-old daughter watch her on TV from back home in Hillwood.

 


End file.
